Black women pilots make historic flight for Delta

Pilots Dawn Cook and Stephanie Johnson made history for Delta Air Lines last weekend.

With Capt. Stephanie Johnson and First Office Dawn Cook at the helm of an Airbus A320 flying from Detroit to Las Vegas on Sunday (Feb. 26), the duo became the first African American women to make up the cockpit crew on one of Delta’s “mainline” flights.

A high school physics teacher encouraged Johnson to follow up on that interest, and she eventually learned to fly while studying at Kent State University in Ohio.
“After building flight time as an instructor, I was hired by a commuter carrier, where I was able to earn enough good flight experience to apply for a job at Northwest Airlines, and I was hired as their first African-American female pilot in 1997,” she said .
When asked how she felt about breaking barriers – first at Northwest and then at Delta – Johnson responded:
“I feel a great sense of responsibility to be a positive role model. There are so few women in this profession and too many women who still don’t think of it as a career option. When I was hired by Northwest Airlines, there were 12 African-American women airline pilots in the country at the major airlines, and I knew all of their names.”