Margot Duhalde

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Margot Duhalde, ca.1944

Margot Duhalde Sotomayor (born December 12, 1920 in Río Bueno , Chile ; † February 5, 2018 in Santiago , Chile) was one of the first Chileans to acquire a pilot's license , a military pilot in World War II and the first Chilean air traffic controller .

Life

Childhood and youth

Margot Duhalde was born in 1920 as the second of twelve children of Maximiliano Duhalde Bahamonde and Rosa Sotomayor Arriagada. Her parents had emigrated from the French Basque Country to the provincial town of Río Bueno in southern Chile. Her father was a farmer, her mother a housewife.

Margot was fascinated by flying from childhood. She regularly watched the mail planes that passed near her hometown en route to Patagonia . The decision pilot to be, she took after she had first seen a plane to an emergency landing at close range. Her parents did not initially support this wish, but she fought for two years to convince them. Eventually she succeeded and at the age of 16 received permission to train as a pilot.

education

When Margot Duhalde tried in Santiago in 1936 to become a member of the Chilean Aviation Club in order to acquire a pilot's license there, she found that she did not meet the necessary requirements. At 16, she did not reach the minimum age of 20, so she gave 1916 as the year of birth, which is documented in a flight license that is in the National Aeronautical Museum of Chile.

During the medical examination, she said she convinced an officer to help her pass the eye test, as her poor eyesight would have meant another exclusion criterion.

Finally she had to find a flight instructor who was willing to train her, even though she was a woman and very young and came from a rural family. The French aviation pioneer Cesar Copetta took over her flying training. On April 30, 1938, Duhalde was the third Chilean woman to receive a pilot's license.

Second World War

After the occupation of France by German troops in June 1940, General Charles de Gaulle, in his 1940 appeal , urged all French to "wherever they are", in the Forces françaises libres (FFL) on the side of the Allies against National Socialist Germany and fight its allies.

Margot Duhalde then volunteered at the French consulate as a pilot for the FFL in London , where de Gaulle was in exile. She did not tell her parents that she would join the army and instead told them that she would go to Canada as a trainer. On her way to England, she joined other recruits and traveled with them on a Norwegian freighter to Liverpool . However, upon arrival in May 1941, she and her companions were arrested on suspicion of espionage and held in London for five days.

De Havilland Dh.82 Tiger Moth of the Royal Air Force

After her release, she was informed that the FFL were not hiring female pilots and that they would instead use them as domestic servants for injured pilots. However, Duhalde really wanted to work as a pilot. She learned that the British air transport units ( Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA)) due to the high number of victims of the RAF had urgent need for pilots and therefore accepted women. The civil organization ATA had the task of aircraft from factories to the combat mission to the squadrons of the Royal Air Force (RAF) transfer . Therefore Duhalde immediately applied to the ATA, passed the pilot test in a Tiger Moth and was accepted on September 1, 1941, although she only had a rudimentary knowledge of the English language.

She was assigned to a pool of female pilots in Hatfield, Hertfordshire , where she was nicknamed "Chile". When she was first used on a solo long-haul flight, her secretive poor eyesight led to an incident. As the view was poor and she wasn't wearing her glasses, she got lost among the balloons and had to make an emergency landing. The machine's chassis broke and Duhalde suffered minor head injuries. Since she had no papers or could explain her situation in English, the police arrested her.

Royal Air Force Supermarine Spitfire F.22

As a result, she was withdrawn from flying for three months to learn English and work with maintenance technicians before she was able to return to the pilot pool. She was then trained as an ATA class 1 pilot, which enabled her to fly light single-engine aircraft. By 1944 she received training in classes 2, 3, 4 and 4+, so that she was allowed to fly all single and twin-engine machines of the British Air Force.

As a pilot, she was assigned to various pilot pools during the war. During that time she delivered more than 1,000 aircraft across England and flew more than 50 types of aircraft, including fighter planes such as the Spitfire and light bombers, as well as transport and training aircraft.

Towards the end of the war, she also delivered aircraft to the Royal Air Force squadrons in France , Belgium and the Netherlands . She stayed with the ATA until November 1945 and rose to the rank of First Officer of the ATA.

After the war

After the Second World War, Duhalde served as the only female pilot in the French Air Force. From January 1946 she was assigned to the 80th UEO (Operational Training Unit) of Spitfires in Ouston near Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England, where she was trained in aerobatics . In March 1946 her squadron was relocated to Meknes , Morocco , then still a French protectorate . At the end of June 1946, she began a tour of South America with a group of 20 pilots to demonstrate French aircraft; she traveled to Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

Back in Chile

Los Cerrillos Airport 1951

In 1947 Duhalde left the French army with the rank of captain. She returned to Chile with the aim of flying for the airline LAN . However, since she still didn't get a chance there as a woman, she initially worked as a private pilot for a wealthy businessman. In February 1948, she moved to the regional airline LIPA-SUR, where she flew small twin-engine machines before she was dismissed in May 1949 as part of staff reduction measures. She then found a job with the Chilean Air Force , where she was trained as the first female air traffic controller. In September 1951, she received the flight instructor license. In the following years she worked in the control towers of the airports Los Cerrillos in Santiago and Antofagasta , from 1960 as head of the control tower of Los Cerrillos. In 1969 she was transferred to the Presidente Carlos Ibáñez del Campo International Airport near Punta Arenas , where she worked as an air traffic controller and later as a flight instructor .

After retiring from the Air Force, she was made an honorary colonel. Despite her old age, she continued to work as a civilian air traffic controller, mostly in Punta Arenas, the Patagonian gateway to Antarctica. In 2000, Margot Duhalde retired at the age of 81. She celebrated her 80th birthday with a parachute jump from a height of 3,600 m. In 2007 she flew an airplane for the last time.

Family and offspring

Duhalde married three times, none of them lasted more than three years. The connection with her second husband has a son named Fernando, who worked for the Chilean Air Force before he became a farmer, and two grandchildren.

Her autobiography, published in 2006 at the age of 86, ends with the words

“Después de todos estos homenajes, en realidad no me siento diferente de cómo me he sentido toda mi vida y siempre tengo proyectos, porque gozo de excelente salud, camino treinta minutos diarios con mi perrita Maitechu, asisto tres veces por h semidana aim clases de en una piscina temperada, practico baile entretenido, manejo mi auto diariamente, vuelo por lo menos dos horas mensuales como piloto al mando, bebo vino tinto y whiskey.
In summary: ¡viviré cien años!… ”

“After all these honors, I don't really feel any different than I have felt all my life, and I always have projects because I'm in excellent health, I walk my dog ​​Maitechu for thirty minutes a day, I visit three times hydro-aerobics classes in a heated swimming pool per week, I practice entertaining dances, I drive my car every day, I fly at least two hours a month as a pilot in charge, I drink red wine and whiskey.
In short: I will live a hundred years! ... "

Margot Duhalde died on February 5, 2018 at the age of 97 in the hospital of the Chilean Air Force in Santiago.

Awards and honors

In 1946 Duhalde was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor and in 2006 by French President Jacques Chirac to the Commander of the National Order of the Legion of Honor. In 1989 she received a medal for the 50th anniversary of the ATA. In 2009 she was awarded the ATA Veteran's Badge by the British Ambassador to Santiago, Howard Drake , for her work with the British Air Transport Auxiliary Force during World War II.

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet described her as a pioneer “who has shown in a world of men that nothing is impossible for women”.

Movies

In 2010 she appeared in the British documentary Spitfire Sisters , which tells the story of the female pilots in the British Air Transport Auxiliary Forces , and in 2011 in Air Transport Auxiliary , another documentary about the organization and its members.

literature

  • Margot Duhalde: Margot Duhalde . Mujer Alada. 2006 (Spanish, archive.org [PDF]). Autobiography: “Margot Duhalde. The winged woman "
  • Antonio Landauro Marín: Margot Duhalde . Mi vida y obra. (Spanish).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Obituary: Margot Duhalde, Chile's first female pilot who came to Europe to help Allies fight Axis forces. In: The Scotsman. March 22, 2018, accessed on January 22, 2020 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Into the air at all costs. In: baskultur.de. Retrieved January 22, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h Chilean Institute for Historical and Aeronautical Research (ed.): Margot Duhalde Sotomayor hizo de sus alas, una profesión . Especial N ° 12 del Instituto de Investigaciones Histórico Aeronáuticas de Chile. 2019 (Spanish, historiaaeronauticadechile.cl [PDF]).
  4. ^ Margot Duhalde: Margot Duhalde . Mujer Alada. 2006 (Spanish).
  5. ↑ Gobierno británico condecora a mujer Manzano de la Aviación chilena. Retrieved February 8, 2020 (Spanish).
personal data
SURNAME Duhalde, Margot
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Duhalde Sotomayor, Margot
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chilean pilot and air traffic controller
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Río Bueno (City)
DATE OF DEATH 5th February 2018
Place of death Santiago de Chile