Elsie MacGill - Engineering Career

Engineering Career

In 1934, she started work at Fairchild Aircraft's operations in Montreal as an Assistant Engineer. In 1938, she was the first woman elected to corporate membership in the Engineering Institute of Canada.

Later that year she was hired as Chief Aeronautical Engineer at Canadian Car and Foundry (CC&F), becoming the first woman in the world to hold such a position. At CC&F she designed and tested a new training aircraft, the Maple Leaf Trainer II.

The Maple Leaf was designed and first built in CC&F's Ft. William (now Thunder Bay) factories, where she had moved. Although the Maple Leaf II did not enter service with any Commonwealth forces, a number were sold to Mexico where its high-altitude performance was important given the many airfields from which it had to operate. Her role in the company changed when the factory was selected to build the Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft for the Royal Air Force (RAF). The factory quickly expanded from about 500 workers to 4,500 by war's end, half of them women. For much of the war MacGill's primary task was to streamline operations in the production line as the factories rapidly expanded. MacGill was also responsible for designing solutions to allow the aircraft to operate during the winter, introducing de-icing controls and a system for fitting skis for landing on snow.

By the time the production line shut down in 1943, CC&F had produced over 1,400 Hurricanes. In 1940 she wrote a paper on the experience, Factors affecting mass production of aeroplanes. Her role in this successful production run made her famous, even to the point of a comic book being published in the United States about her, using her then-famous nickname, "Queen of the Hurricanes". Numerous popular stories were published about her in the media as well, reflecting the public's fascination with this female engineer.

After Hurricane production ended, CC&F looked for new work and secured with a contract from the US Navy to build SB2C Helldivers. This production did not go nearly as smoothly, and a continual stream of minor changes from Curtiss-Wright (in turn demanded by the US Navy) meant that full-scale production took a long time to get started. In the midst of this project MacGill and the works manager, E. J. (Bill) Soulsby, were dismissed. It was initially rumored that Soulsby had been curt with a group of senior naval officers who had visited a week earlier, but it was later revealed the reason for the dismissals was that the two were having an affair.

MacGill and Soulsby were married in 1943 and moved to Toronto, where they set up an aeronautical consulting business. In 1946, she became the first woman to serve as Technical Advisor for ICAO, where she helped to draft International Air Worthiness regulations for the design and production of commercial aircraft. In 1947 she became the chairman of the United Nations Stress Analysis Committee, the first woman ever to chair a UN committee.