WOMAN IN CIVIL AIR LINE

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26396, 14 April 1951, Page 2

WOMAN IN CIVIL AIR LINE

OPERATIONS MANAGER IN SHANGHAI

FORMER NEW ZEALAND SCHOOLTEACHER

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, April 13. Six years ago a teacher at Queen Margaret College, Wellington, resigned her position and set out to see the world. Yesterday she stepped down from a Curtiss Commando transport aircraft at Paraparaumu after a flight from Formosa, and busily started to make arrangements for the American crew. The schoolteacher was home again, having seen much of the world, and having in the process carved a niche for herself in aviation as operations manager of the company. Formerly Miss Olive Wilkinson, a graduate of the Wellington Teachers’ Training College, Mrs King says her effect on people is an advantage. “Over there we sometimes run into trouble,” she explains. “People get mad and demand to see the manager, that is all right until they see me—then their jaws drop and' they are speechless. I can fix things up In no time at all.” When she left here in 1945, Mrs King went to Canada as a teacher. After a Sear she went to Shanghai to visit er sister who was working for UNRRA. There she took a job as secretary to the chief pilot of Civil Air Transport, then she became Operations Manager of the company. Last October she married Captain Lawrence King, a pilot of the British Overseas Airways Corporation, who will be joining her in New Zealand soon. Her transports are here to carry goods across Cook Strait for the Railways Department. Ttyey have just arrived from Formosa, and nobody wanted them to start work until Monday. She had other ideas, however, and the first flight by a, Commando may be on Saturday.