Advertisement

When mom is a commercial pilot, breastfeeding is a problem

 
Brandy Beck, with her son and daughter at home in Denver, has faced challenges as a female pilot in the overwhelmingly male airline industry.
Brandy Beck, with her son and daughter at home in Denver, has faced challenges as a female pilot in the overwhelmingly male airline industry.
Published Aug. 27, 2016

Boarding a flight can feel like stepping into a time capsule: Men typically fly the plane, while most flight attendants are still women. Which is why a female pilot from Delta Air Lines did something dramatic at a union meeting recently.

Standing before her male colleagues, the captain unbuttoned her uniform, strapped a breast pump over the white undershirt she wore, and began to demonstrate the apparatus. As the machine made its typical "chug, chug" noise, attendees squirmed in their seats, looked at their feet and shuffled papers.

It was the latest episode in what has proved to be a difficult workplace issue: how to accommodate commercial airline pilots balancing new motherhood.

It is a question that some employers have answered by creating leave policies or lactation rooms. But the flight deck of a jumbo jet isn't a typical workplace. Pilots are exempt from a provision in the Affordable Care Act requiring employers to accommodate new mothers. At 30,000 feet, the issue touches not only on pilot privacy, but also aircraft safety.

At Delta, a group of female pilots have banded together through a private Facebook page and have approached their union with formal proposals for paid maternity leave — unheard-of at the major airlines — because they say they would like to stay home to breastfeed their babies. At Frontier Airlines, four female pilots are suing the company for discrimination, seeking the option of temporary assignments on the ground while pregnant or nursing.

While their proposals differ, all say they aim for one thing: to avoid situations in which pilots have been leaving the cockpit in midflight for as long as 20 minutes, the amount of time often required to pump breast milk.

"The airlines have maternity policies that are archaic," said Kathy McCullough, 61, a retired captain for Northwest Airlines, which merged with Delta in 2008, who has advocated on behalf of the pilots to Delta management. "I am so glad that they're stepping forward and taking a stand."

One reason for the lack of rules is that women make up only about 4 percent of the nation's 159,000 certified airline pilots, a number that has been slow to rise over the past decade or so.

There were no female pilots at the biggest airlines until 1973, when American Airlines hired the first. In a reminder of how times have changed, that news was reported in the Los Angeles Times under the headline, "Airline Pilot to Fly by Seat of Panties."

More than 40 years later, the major carriers still haven't resolved this issue. They set their policies for pilots based on the collective bargaining agreements negotiated by the unions. But women of childbearing age account for just a sliver of union membership, so maternity leave and breastfeeding policies have not been at the top of union agendas.

Plus, some members oppose the proposals, citing the costs.

Delta's female pilots still hope to win over a majority of their colleagues. They argue that without paid leave, they're faced with a choice to either stay home to breastfeed their babies or earn income for their families.

Female pilots can begin to lose wages months before a baby is born. Most contracts at major airlines force pregnant pilots to stop flying eight to 14 weeks before a baby's due date.

After the push by Delta's pilots this summer, the airline changed its policy. Delta now allows them to fly, with their doctor's approval, until the end of pregnancy. Morgan Durrant, a spokesman for Delta, said that once they stop flying, women can use accrued sick days or apply for disability benefits to help cover lost wages. Otherwise, leave is unpaid.

Once a baby is born, the major airlines typically don't offer paid maternity leave or alternative ground assignments for breastfeeding mothers. Some carriers, including United Airlines and Alaska Airlines, do offer female pilots up to one year of unpaid leave. Until recently, Delta did not offer such a policy, but the airline has added one year of unpaid leave to the pilot contract.

The Delta female pilots are seeking a leave policy to let mothers stay home for six months with pay to breast-feed newborns, and up to two years unpaid.