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WESTERN BUREAU:
The woman who became the first female pilot to captain an Air Jamaica aircraft has hung up her wings after more than four decades of commandeering the skies.
A Montegonian by birth, Captain Maria Ziadie-Haddad, who has the record of flying to 108 countries, logging more than 20,000 flight hours, completed her last commercial airline trip recently, when she flew an Atlas Air B747-400 from Riverside, California, to Cherry Point, North Carolina.
Ziadie-Haddad, the third woman in Jamaica to earn a local commercial licence, says she plans to teach aviation in the near future.
When she sat in an aircraft in 1975 at Wings Jamaica to obtain a private pilot certificate, two other Jamaican women had paved the way, Earsley Barnett and Yola Caine, who went on to work for the Jamaica Defence Force.