Last year Don wrote to then PM Tony Abbott urging he consider honouring Australia’s first female commercial pilot. Mr Abbott has gone on record to support naming the new airport after John Bradfield, the civil engineer who oversaw the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He was also on record stating he would make a “captain’s pick” on the issue.

Don said he has also written to current Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and local member David Gillespie on the naming of the new airport at Badgery’s Creek.

Given Sydney’s existing airport is named after Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, naming the second in honour of Nancy-Bird Walton made sense to Don.

“Nancy was one of Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith’s first students at his flying school at Mascot,” Don said.

“To have the main airport named after the teacher and the second airport named after the student fits to my mind. 

“She is Australian-born, right here at Kew. I worked at Bourke and she used to park her plane under a pepper tree when she was flying for the Royal Far West Children’s Scheme. I know of some of the tough conditions she faced as a woman pilot.”

Nancy entitled her autobiography “My God! It’s a Woman!” the comment a grazier, trapped on an outback property, made after being told the pilot flying to his rescue was named Nancy.

This was pretty much the typical response to a female pilot when Nancy began her career, gaining her commercial pilot’s licence in 1935.

There were few jobs for male pilots at the time, let alone women and Nancy’s parents bought her a Gypsy Moth which she flew around the country working at fairs offering joy flights.

The Reverend Stanley Drummer hired Nancy to transport nurses for the Royal Far West Children’s Scheme to help mothers and babies in remote towns and properties.

Nancy then bought a Leopard Moth and operated as an air ambulance service when she moved to Cunnamulla in Queensland. After winning the ladies trophy in the South Australian Centenary Air Race from Brisbane to Adelaide in 1936 she took a tow-year world tour to study civil aviation. The study was courtesy of the Cutch East Indies Airline which wanted to break into the Australian market.

She met Englishman Charles Walton on her tour and they married in 1939. With the outbreak of the second world war, Nancy-Bird Walton, recruited and trained women for a women’s auxiliary air force. The WAAF was formed but because she was married, Nancy couldn’t join, so she stayed as commandant of the Women’s Air Training Corps. In 1950 Nancy founded the Australian Women’s Pilots’ Association and was their president until 1990.

She finished in the top five of 61 entries, with her co-pilot Iris Critchell, in the 1958 Powder Puff Derby, an all female transcontinental air race in the USA. Politics beckoned and Nancy helped form the Women’s Movement against Socialism which, she said, aimed to educate Australian women in politics and not vote according to their husbands’ wishes. In 1990 Nancy was awarded and OBE and became an Officer of the Order of Australia. Nancy was named a National Treasure by the National Trust in 1997 and in 2008 Qantas named its first A380 in her honour. 

“It’s time we honoured women and named places after them. Why should one bloke in Sydney or a politician have the final say on what the new airport will be named?” Don said.

The Camden Haven Courier has sent a request to the Western Sydney Airport team to find information on how and when the new airport will be named.

Information in this story was from Nancy-Bird Walton’s obituary, written by Harriet Veitch and Malcolm Brown, and published in the Sydney Morning Herald on January 13, 2009.