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Our Members
Michelle Bassanesi
 Michelle
Bassanesi (Mash for her friends, after her favorite film)
was born in Sydney (Australia) where
her family had relocated.
Her mother was the secretary to the managing director of
Alitalia's first Australian Branch
and her father was a project supervisor
for Australia's Electric Power Transmission
Company. At the age of 16 the family returned to Italy.
After completing
high
school in Rome Mash began working
as accountant in the business her grandmother had set up
in the meantime http://www.eventservices.it.
Over the years she assumed the
whole accounting responsibility
of the company.
Almost by chance, Mash got exposed to flight and began
paragliding, both as a competitor and as a contest organizer,
at all levels.
In 1993 she suffered a severe flight
accident which took years to fully recover from. At the
end she switched to airplanes
and got rapidly most licenses available
both sides of the Ocean up to JAA ATPL and FAA CFI, and
continues to fly on
almost any flyable device, including
Ultralights.
While training she realized that
something was to be done
to ease women in reaching valuable results
in aerospace, not
only in the flight deck
but also in aviation-related professions.
For this reason she joined
and volunteered in several associations
(WAI, 99s, WCA, AOPA, NAFI)
but noticed that everything done was too targeted
to USA, while Europe was
almost silent on
the issue. Trying to promote
the whole theme on the other side of
the Atlantic she founded
AWE - Aviation and Women
in Europe www.aweu.org and
in 2005 organized the first
Aviation and Women in Europe
conference
in Trento (Italy), hosted
by Caproni Aviation Museum.
The
initiative
was a sound success with
many ladies coming from
almost the whole world
presenting their activities
and
discussing how to do more
and and how to better promote
female
presence
in aerospace. A second
convention is
on
the way for the 2006 edition,
to be held
in Varese (Italy), "The
Province with Wings," where
most of Italian aerospace
industry
is concentrated.
During
the Women in Aviation Int.l Conference
in March 2006, AWE became
the WAI Europe
Section (provisional
status) and Michelle
volunteered as the Ambassador Chapter's
Aviation Education
Chair, already with projects
including collecting
oral histories of European
women in aviation!
In
the meantime Michelle
keeps flying and
her new frontier is aerobatics! (Submitted April 2006)
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Ambassador Chapter