Maryse Carmichael retired from the Royal Canadian Air Force in 2013 and now works for CAE, a company that delivers advanced training, simulation and modelling technologies, virtual reality and analytics to civil and military customers worldwide.
Midway through the Snowbirds’ routine, Pilots 5 through 9 peel off to begin head-on crosses and other solo manoeuvres while the rest get set up for one of the most challenging formations of all: the double take. Rising from 300 feet, the No. 1 pilot, the lead, orders Nos. 2 and 3 to “roll inverted,” or belly-up. Seconds later, the entire package rolls as if flipped by a giant invisible spatula, leaving Nos. 1 and 4 now inverted. Then the lead calls out for the four-ship to right-side itself again.
Fans licking ice creams in the stands might focus on the soloists, not realizing what it takes for the red-striped Tutors to roll like this, flying at 280 knots (520 kilometres per hour) and about two metres apart wingtip to wingtip. Flying inverted means rewiring your brain to perceive and do everything against your training: move the stick right and the plane veers left. Positive-Gs turn an uncomfortable negative as the blood rushes to your head, while after 25 seconds or so of upside-down flight, your engine risks flaming out.
The double take is so extremely difficult, in fact, it was removed from the Snowbirds’ performance lineup for several years. But by 2000, when then-Capt. Maryse Carmichael joined the Canadian Air Force’s famed demonstration team — and when she returned a decade later as the team’s commanding officer — the double take was back. It’s the ultimate test of skill, professionalism, teamwork and trust — qualities embodying the ideals of the military.
The double take was Carmichael’s favourite formation. It’s a fitting choice for someone who zeroed in on the seemingly impossible to achieve and made it look effortless.
This fall, the retired lieutenant-colonel will be inducted into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame, recognizing her history-making career with the Canadian Armed Forces and later rise through the ranks of Montreal aerospace company CAE. Carmichael was Canada’s first, but also the world’s first, woman jet demonstration team pilot, and the Snowbirds’ first woman commanding officer.
To grasp the magnitude of that, fewer than 10 per cent of the RCAF’s 1,400 pilots today are women. Only seven have become CF-18 fighter pilots in the whole history of the armed forces, including the most recent graduate, Capt. Kathryn Guenther. And only one other woman, Capt. Sarah Dallaire, has flown as a pilot with the Snowbirds. “I think Maryse has impacted a lot more people than we will ever know,” says Dallaire. “Her example was something I could always rely on. It was a feeling that ‘I can do this; I just have to find a way.’”
After air shows, the Snowbirds debrief for hours, going over each manoeuvre to learn from mistakes and aim for perfection, next time. By extension, what lessons are there to learn from Carmichael’s experience that could inspire more women not just to fly, but to choose the toughest flight path, and soar?
The ‘barrier-free’ early days
In 1980, the RCAF opened its pilot classification to women, and in 1989, a Human Rights Tribunal order triggered the integration of women into nearly every position in the military. By the early-1990s, the first women pilots were “operational.” By then, they were coming to flight surgeons such as Karen Breeck with landmark medical concerns: How to fly safely while pregnant, for instance.
Integration had been legislated to happen so quickly, the research and evidence-based policy work to support women’s unique needs in the military were just beginning. “I knew we could do better for women, if we knew better,” Breeck explains. So, in 1999-2000, she conducted a study that interviewed every woman pilot of the CAF — 33 at the time, including Carmichael. As it turned out, her subjects had a lot in common.
For starters, most had been exposed to aviation in childhood, often at air shows. They tended to have supportive families — and very often men as role models in their lives — who nurtured their passion for aviation. Since flying lessons aren’t cheap, many had also joined the Royal Canadian Air Cadets, an economic equalizer for generations of teenagers who have earned their first pilot licences for free.
In Carmichael’s case, before she could drive, she was already flying cross-country as a 17-year-old private pilot trained by the Air Cadets’ 630 Squadron near Quebec City. Her three older brothers had been in the squadron, and the family regularly attended the Bagotville International Air Show, in La Baie, Que. That’s where Carmichael distinctly remembers, at age seven, seeing her first “Big Diamond” — the classic Snowbird 9-Ship formation — while her big brother Eddy recalls the fun of picnicking amid the smell of jet fuel.
After Eddy joined the RCAF, his little sister naturally followed, enlisting at 19: “I remember thinking, ‘If Eddy can do it, so can I,’” Carmichael says. “Maybe I was naïve, but I just didn’t see barriers growing up.”
Barriers did, and do still exist, of course. Investigations ranging from the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women to the latest by retired Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour, have identified sexual misconduct, discrimination, unconscious bias and other systemic barriers to diversity and inclusion within the military. At the release of the Arbour report in May, Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre promised, as an “absolute necessity,” a timely response from the CAF to improve its record on women’s issues and diversity and inclusion. “We have made clear over the course of last year, we don’t have all the answers,” he said.
Back in the 1990s, Carmichael’s generation of women pilots simply began redrafting policy for themselves. For instance, when she arrived at flight training school at 15 Wing Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan in January 1993 for the start of jet training, she was assigned to a women’s barracks, but quickly requested to transfer to the all-male pilots’ barracks — even though co-ed accommodations didn’t yet exist. “At 21, I was not shy to say, ‘I know you’ve been doing things a certain way for many years, but that’s going to change,” she explains. “I knew that to be successful on my course, I needed the same intel and bonding with other pilots; I couldn’t be different.”
You only have to look as far as the Snowbirds’ jet to understand the challenge viscerally. The CT-114 Tutor has a minimum pilot weight requirement of 130 pounds. That’s because it calculates the ejection seat’s flight envelope based on an average white male physique. Older ejection-seat jets like the Tutor, in other words, weren’t designed with women’s lighter bodies in mind. It leaves women, even today, at higher statistical risk of being disqualified from flying certain aircraft before they ever step inside.
With all eyes of a flight school on you — a feeling of being othered that’s well-studied in the literature — one way forward is to find “others” with whom you can forge a sense of belonging. Many of the pilots in Breeck’s study were francophones, which isn’t surprising given that they represent a higher proportion of military personnel overall (from a 2015 survey: 26.7 per cent of the CAF versus the national average of 22.8 per cent.) Thus, Carmichael wasn’t left out for being a woman; she was let in to the close-knit fraternity of French-speaking fellow pilots and instructors of the RCAF, including her brother, who provided crucial cover.
Carmichael and the entire Snowbirds team when she was a member. She’s on the far left.
Earning her wings
When she earned her wings in 1994, tradition dictated that the reviewing officer (often a general) would pin them to Maryse’s dress blues, yet she chose Eddy for that honour.
His other fond memory was simply flying with his sister — in a Cessna with the Air Cadets; as Tutor instructors together in Moose Jaw (after Maryse applied, but was not selected, for the CF-18 fighter force); or in a Challenger 601 after she joined the 412 (VIP Transport) Squadron in Ottawa, ferrying cabinet ministers, governors general and then-prime minister Jean Chrétien internationally.
Those were good times crisscrossing continents. Lots of practical joking in the cockpit and friendly rivalry over who could stick the smoothest “greaser” touchdowns. Going to bed early so they could wake up earlier, to fly even longer. “Maryse was always very determined to perfect her craft,” he says. And as she rose, professionally, ever higher, she’d bring questions or concerns to Eddy that he’d do his best to answer.
He understood the stakes for his sister, having witnessed his own troubling incidents. A friend had left RCAF pilot training in Eddy’s year despite her obvious talent. Another was asked by the commander of an Air Cadets glider camp, “Do you know why the sky is blue, not pink?”
“I think women needed to be stronger, to kind of fight or forget people who were saying nasty stuff back then, because some people were saying nasty stuff,” Eddy recalls.
In November 2000, on her second try, Carmichael was accepted to the 431 (Air Demonstration) Squadron in Moose Jaw. Her first, unsuccessful tryout, in 1997, had been a lesson in the importance of self-confidence. A pilot who questions her own judgment can be a flight safety risk. During her routine, she’d briefly doubted her performance and it was noted. “Your wingman has to trust you with their life flying in close formation, so you must be fully accepted by everyone,” she explains.
On the team, she performed as No. 3, the inner left wing, and later No. 2, the inner right wing. Underscoring the risk, No. 2 was the position of a good friend, Capt. Michael Jasper Vanden Bos, who had died months earlier in a training accident. Over the years, there have been 25 serious mid-air incidents involving the team, and eight pilots and two passengers lost.
“If I had to summarize my time as a Snowbird, including the technicians that repair those airplanes, it’s teamwork and trust: this is what it’s really all about,” she says.
Years later, in a daytime ceremony in 2010, Carmichael bookended her experience with the Snowbirds by accepting the squadron colours, crest and battle honours (hard-won over Britain during the Second World War) from the previous commander. As the new CO, she hung a poster on her office wall that read, ‘In Pursuit of Excellence,’ with the ambition to leave the team stronger than she’d entered it.
Nearing the end of her three-year term, one of the pilots became ill, jeopardizing winter training for the whole team, so they invited Carmichael to rejoin temporarily. It was a measure of trust and acceptance that she’d earned over the years. And the mission was all the more memorable because as she taxied back to the ramp at 15 Wing Moose Jaw, her daughters Georgia, now 16, and Danielle, now 13, were watching.
‘Diversity challenges the way you think’
Carmichael’s later years in the military were a juggle of marriage, motherhood and ground and operational postings (alternated with those of then-husband and F-18 pilot Lt.-Col. (ret’d) Scott Greenough). She worked at Wing Operations at 3 Wing Bagotville and then flew CC-130 Hercules tactical transport aircraft out of 8 Wing Trenton. After her command of the Snowbirds, she retired from the CAF in 2013.
These days, she continues to support the Canadian military as an aerospace industry thought leader, now with CAE, a company founded by an ex-RCAF officer that delivers advanced training, simulation and modelling technologies, virtual reality and analytics to civil and military customers worldwide in
air, land, maritime, space and cyber domains. CAE is also one of the world’s largest providers of early-stage (“ab initio“ and “initial“) flight training, and has its own training centres and fleets of aircraft.
As CAE’s special adviser for aircrew training, Carmichael is working on programs such as Future Aircrew Training, Canada’s next-generation pilot and aircrew training procurement. She’s also just earned a master’s of business administration, specializing in aerospace from the Toulouse Business School in France.
Despite three decades of a pioneering career in defence, she still can’t definitively say why there have been so few women pilots, though she attributes much of her success “to the mostly men who supported, guided and mentored me through the years.” To those who believed in her, “first and foremost, I was a military pilot; I don’t think it mattered that I was a woman.”
A Federal Retirees member since January 2022, Carmichael greatly admires the brave women — and men — who have survived workplace violence and harassment and are coming to the fore to effect positive change. Her own experience of the CAF was very different, though, and she remains cautious of broad stereotypes of military culture. The military has had in place equal pay for more than 50 years, she notes; along with extended parental leave and maternity leave top-ups that compare favourably to the private sector’s inconsistent patchwork.
“I think Chris Hadfield said it best: if it’s only men or only women making important decisions, you’re probably doing it wrong,’” says Carmichael.
“Diversity challenges the way you think and brings a different side of human beings to the table; that’s why everyone needs to be there.”
Coming full circle
As a Snowbird pilot, Carmichael loved most when very old women would approach her at air shows, touch her arm and say “how they wished they could’ve flown.” Fast-forward a few years to 2017 and she got to observe the Snowbird tryouts and was on the receiving line when Capt. Dallaire made the team. And today, both of her daughters are Air Cadets with a passion for aviation and space.
There’s a sense of life coming full circle, and of the responsibility that women pilots bear as stewards of a legacy carried forward from one generation to the next. “I have enjoyed what many women have fought for — and what many women still don’t have in other countries,” she says.
Now, as a veteran observing how the military will respond to renewed calls for change, it’s Carmichael’s turn to be nostalgic. A much-needed discussion about where the RCAF goes from here is underway, she says, and “I would love to be part of the solution.” Most would say, she already is.