Three-time U.S. National Aerobatic Champion and longtime air show pilot Patty Wagstaff, EAA 200806, will be presenting at the EAA Aviation Museum on Thursday, November 15 at 7 p.m. as part of the Aviation Adventure Speaker Series.
Patty, who was the first woman to win the U.S. National Aerobatic Championships, has many awards and accolades to her name. She was the recipient of the National Air and Space Museum’s Award for Current Achievement in 1994, was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2004, and is a six-time recipient of the Betty Skelton First Lady of Aerobatics Award.
As her father was an airline pilot, aviation is in Patty’s blood, but ironically it was a negative experience as an airplane passenger that gave her the push to learn to fly herself. While working for a company in Alaska, Patty needed to charter a small airplane for her job and it crashed on takeoff, inspiring her to train for her pilot certificate.
“I had a job where I had to go to all the different villages in the region,” Patty explained. “They told me to charter an airplane, so I did. There were several different air taxis around and I called one and chartered it. They picked me up and we landed. Then we picked up another passenger, then took off and crashed. It was totally pilot error and we were okay; nobody got hurt. That’s when I decided to learn to fly. I knew the guy made a mistake and thought, ‘This is stupid, I can do better than that.’”
Although Patty is qualified to fly a variety of aircraft types from warbirds to jets; has earned her commercial, instrument, seaplane, and commercial helicopter ratings; and is a flight and instrument instructor, she’s most famous for her aerobatic career — both as a competitor and as an air show performer.
“I was intrigued with it even as a kid,” Patty said of aerobatic flying. “I asked my dad what it was like to do a loop and that kind of thing from his military training, but I’d never seen it, I’d never been to an air show. I was one of those kids where I loved hanging upside down on monkey bars and I would stand on my head for hours and read books. I just really liked that gymnastics kind of thing. Aerobatics was sort of a natural progression. You don’t know why you like these things, it just kind of chooses you sometimes.”
As someone who has experience with numerous types of flying, Patty knows that if you want to excel in aerobatics, it truly has to be your focus as a pilot.
“First you have to love it. You have to want to do it. That’s number one. You have to have the desire,” she said. “You have to have a lot of discipline; you have to train a lot. You have to be really focused on it and it really has to be your priority if you want to be good at it. There are a lot of people that think that they want to do air shows or fly competition or whatever, but if they can’t make it their priority, and that means sacrificing things, then you’re not going to be successful. If you look at all the successful aerobatic pilots, both in competition and air shows, they sacrifice a lot to do what they do. It really has to be a driving force. That doesn’t mean you can’t go out and do a loop and a roll on a weekend and have a fun airplane. But to do it full-time and for a living, it really has to be a driving force.”
While Patty has been very successful both in competition aerobatics and the air show circuit, she noted that the two are quite distinct in approach, execution, and mindset.
“The flying is quite different,” Patty said. “Competition flying is flown a little higher, it’s very structured. There’s no spectators and everything is scored on a scale of 1-10. Air show flying is flown lower. Everybody tells you how great it is as opposed to critiquing everything you do. For me, when I was competing, I really liked the balance of the two. I didn’t want to do just one or the other. When I stopped competing and just did air shows, I tried to bring the discipline of competition into air shows and still practice competition-style aerobatics. There’s quite a difference. Competition flying, everybody gets really nervous. They go in there and there’s judges watching them and so on. In air shows, it’s fun. It’s a whole different type of focus and discipline, but it’s more fun in a way, but maybe not as a rewarding as competition was.”
In addition to her aerobatics career, Patty has also worked as an aerial firefighter in California, flying OV-10s, and currently operates an aerobatics and upset prevention and recovery training flight school in St. Augustine, Florida. As she reflected on her aviation career, and the variety of honors and accomplishments she’s earned, Patty said one milestone stood out.
“I’m really proud of being the first woman to win the U.S. Nationals,” she said. “That’s probably the thing I’m most proud of because it took me a long time to do it, it was really hard, and it was a full-time mental and physical effort. When I first started competing, I didn’t know what my goal was, I just wanted to fly. As I got into it, I heard men, even women, say that a woman couldn’t win. I was really confused by that, so I decided to make it my goal and the way I approached it was to make it an educational process, to show that it was possible and educate men, and the women, too, that you didn’t have to be a certain type of woman, you could be fun and feminine as well and still win because the airplane doesn’t know the difference. After I won, a number of women have won. It’s exciting and fantastic because it kind of opened the door and now it’s not a big deal. That was really important to me.”