Iranian Female Pilot Celebrates First Flight as Certified Captain

An Iranian female pilot who shared her first flights and her experiences while training on Instagram announced on Saturday, July 20 that she is now a fully-qualified airplane captain.

In a video taken on the runway of Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport, Neshat Jahandari can be seen receiving the four stripes marking her captainship, bestowed on her by her teacher, named only as “Shokrabi.” She also posted her thanks on Instagram, expressing gratitude to her husband and her family for supporting her in her difficult endeavor.

The government of Iran does not provide scholarships to train female pilots, but enthusiasts can enroll in aviation schools, provided they pay the full price themselves. Aseman, the first aviation school for women in Iran, was founded in 2004. It trained students to read and use plan position indicators, taught them avionics (managing a plane’s electronic systems), hosting, repairs and maintenance, flight guidance, and other related areas. Since the institution was established, the number of similar schools has increased. Despite IranWire’s attempts, these schools did not respond to requests for information regarding tuition and costs.

Jahandari’s Instagram followers are mostly young aviation enthusiasts, and they routinely ask her a range of questions about becoming a certified pilot. One of them, while praising her accomplishments, speculates that Jahandari likely had the financial support of her family. She adds that although she has huge enthusiasm for aviation, she cannot afford the costs. And Jahandari confirmed that Iran does not offers scholarships.

“God Have Mercy!”

Women have pursued aviation for decades. However, there is not full agreement regarding the first Iranian female pilot. Some, based on an interview with a women’s journal in 1974, believe it was Effat Tejaratchi, who was born in 1917. She told the journal that she was the first female applicant when the first aviation school, Iranian Aero Club, was founded in 1939.

Others cite Akram Monfared Arya, born in 1946, as Iran’s first woman pilot. In 1974, when she was the mother of five children between the ages of two and 11, she decided to take flying lessons and after successfully completing her training, continued to pilot planes until the 1979 Islamic Revolution. After the revolution, she left Iran with her children and migrated to Sweden. Since then, she has written one autobiography and a number of books about women’s rights and is now a member of the Swedish Association of Authors.

Other female pilots have also been given the unofficial accolade as the first female pilot, including Ghodsieh Farrokhzad Naraghi, Ina Ushid, Ozra Rahimi, Derakhshandeh Malakouti, and Safieh Partovi. There is no agreement on who the first Iranian female pilot was after the revolution either. Many names have been put forward, including Shahrzad Shams, Fahimeh Ahmadi Dastjerdi and Anahita Nikookar.

“I remember once, when I introduced myself to the passengers before takeoff, a very loud masculine voice reached the cockpit, shouting: ‘God have mercy! The pilot is a woman’,” Anahita Nikookar told Borna News Agency in an interview [Persian link]. “But then we heard women cheering and applauding.”

What is certain is that these women succeeded in becoming pilots by spending a lot of their own money. In Iran, if an individual cannot afford the expenses, they have no chance of becoming a pilot.

“Under the Pahlavi monarchy training women to become pilots moved very slowly but the will was there,” says Hossein Aryan, a military affairs analyst. “For instance, a woman could become a police officer or even an officer in the navy. To be a member of the navy, you must board a battleship where you cannot separate genders the way you do on land. But, in those days, several women joined the navy and took training courses on long sea voyages. Training woman pilots was also becoming common but after 1979, the religious environment would not allow it.”

Aryan hopes that Iranian women will have a friendlier environment for pursuing such careers in the future. “In other countries women can easily become pilots of commercial or even military aircraft,” says Aryan. “Recently, for the first time in the US Army, a woman general was appointed as the commander of a combat corps whereas, up to now, men had a monopoly on this job.”

Aryan says that international experience proves that women can do these jobs as well as any man. But the fact remains that in Iran only a handful of women from well-to-do families can embark on such endeavors.

Fahimeh Ahmadi Dastjerdi was 36 when she decided to become a pilot and, as she told Fars News Agency in 2018 [Persian link], she had to spend between 150 and 200 million tomans (between $36,000 and $48,000 at current exchange rates) to achieve her goal.

Keyvan Veismoradi, a former Iranian Air Force fighter pilot who now lives in Canada, told IranWire that, about 15 years ago, to complete a private pilot license course, which usually includes between 30 to 50 hours of flying, one needed approximately 40 million tomans ($45,000 at the 2004 currency exchange rate) but now, with inflation being so high, the price tag will naturally be much, much higher.

“In my 13 years as a military pilot, I never witnessed a formal program to train women,” says Veismoradi. “Iran has a long background in launching commercial airlines, but most of the trainers and pilots are men. The few women who have succeeded in this field have been either independent enthusiasts who worked hard against the odds and spent their own money or, very rarely, women who were given a chance for propaganda purposes.”

Speaking about the pilot’s badge, Veismoradi says: “Three stripes identifies a copilot but when a copilot receives four stripes he is qualified to be the captain and take independent command of a flight.”

On July 20, Neshat Jahandari was awarded her four stripes and took her first flight as a captain. The news and photographs of this achievement made many Iranian women rejoice across social media sites.