Elsie MacGill was the first Canadian woman to receive an electrical engineering degree, and was the first female aircraft designer.
Image Credit: Website of Veterans Affairs Canada
A shortage of skilled workers saw thousands of women recruited to work in wartime aircraft factories with most having no prior aviation or manufacturing experience.
One important exception was Elizabeth Muriel Gregory (Elsie) MacGill, who in 1927 became the first woman to graduate from the University of Toronto with an Electrical Engineering Degree and in 1929 graduated from the University of Michigan with a master’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering and was in fact the first woman in North America to hold a degree in aeronautical engineering.
After doctoral studies in aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1932-1933, McGill was hired as an engineer at Fairchild Aircraft Limited at Longueuil, Quebec in 1934 where she worked on the first stressed-skin, all-metal fuselage aircraft designed and built in Canada.
Then in 1938 she become Chief Aeronautical Engineer at the Fort William (Thunder Bay) plant of Canadian Car and Foundry Company Limited (Can Car). She became the first woman to lead the over-all design of an airplane, the Maple Leaf II, a two-seat, single-engine biplane trainer. At the same time, the factory received a large-scale order from the British government to produce the British-designed Hawker Hurricane fighter, with MacGill in charge of all engineering.
The factory produced a total of 1,450 Hurricanes in three and a half years, and then MacGill was responsible for launching production of the Curtiss-Wright Helldiver bomber ordered by the U.S. Navy. This was very challenging since there were many engineering changes to the U.S. aircraft design.
In 1942, the American True Comics series in the U.S. dubbed her “Queen of the Hurricanes” in a comic book series.
In 1943, MacGill left Can Car to become an aerospace consultant in Toronto. Outside aviation, she was very active as an advocate for the rights of women and children.
– Kenneth Swartz
Today, students from Centennial College, Toronto Metropolitan University, Queens University, McMaster University, York University and the University of Toronto are working together on collaborative DAIR projects, developing skills and helping to build an even stronger aerospace industry for Ontario and Canada.