'Flying Grandma' remembered
Marie McMillan was 92
Pilot Marie McMillan, who posted hundreds of aviation records and was affectionately called the “Flying Grandma” later in life, died March 24 at age 92 in Las Vegas.
The aviator’s “passion for flight began at a young age watching, listening, and studying aircraft and flight history,” an online obituary noted. She soloed in 1963, earned her private pilot certificate in 1970, and added commercial, multiengine land and sea, glider, and flight instructor certificates and ratings.
McMillan is recognized by the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame at McCarran International Airport where the aviatrix was hailed as a “true pioneer” of aviation. The Hall of Fame display paid homage to McMillan’s “grace, elegance, humility, intelligence, and determination.”
She set her first speed record during a flight from Fresno, California, to Las Vegas on the anniversary of powered flight in 1978. McMillan went on to set a total of 328 U.S. National records and 328 international or world records—for a grand total of 656. She was the first woman to establish aviation records in Mexico, and the second only to aviation legend Charles Lindbergh, the Hall of Fame noted.
Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame Director T. D. Barnes told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that McMillan was involved with “just about anything having to do with aviation.” She worked as a Las Vegas-based flight instructor for 25 years, flew medical mercy missions to California and to Mexico, and was “an inspiration, particularly to women,” he recalled.
The aviatrix “flew as often as she could” and entered women’s aviation air race derbies “around the world,” the newspaper reported.
She received bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and in gerontology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). UNLV history professor Michael Green saluted the “feisty” McMillan as “a pioneer and an important figure in her own right as an aviator.” She was married to Nevada civil rights pioneer James McMillan, who was also a pilot, and the couple both drove sports cars. “She had a Jaguar and he had a Corvette, so they’d go out racing,” Green said.
In 1985 McMillan published an advertisement in The Ninety-Nines International Women Pilot Organization’s newsletter seeking “two other grandmas” to become “part of history.” The group noted that she had already accumulated an “unprecedented” number of national and world aviation records. The newsletter reported that McMillan’s ultimate quest was to capture 1,000 aviation records.
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