When pilot Deborah Lawrie took the controls of her first flight for Ansett Airlines in 1980, one passenger was so shocked to hear a woman's voice coming over the P.A. that he demanded to be let off.

She calmly instructed the crew to bring the complaining passenger up to the flight deck.

"As it turned out, just as he entered, we got a radio call and had to do a few things which probably looked complicated to him so I told him to wait a minute," she said.

"I did what I had to do then turned around to him and said 'Oh, yeah, what can I help you with?' And he said 'It's OK, it really doesn't matter.'

"So he decided he wasn't going to complain after all. It's quite funny, really."

Deborah had already been flying for 10 years, having fallen in love with aviation when her father gave her two flying lessons for her 16th birthday.

Deborah Lawrie became a pilot after winning a landmark sex discrimination case against Ansett Airlines. ( Supplied )

There had been pioneering female pilots who flew for smaller airlines and charter companies in regional Australia..

But no major Australian airline had ever employed a woman pilot and it required years of rejections and a battle in the Sex Discrimination Commission before Ansett finally took her on.

"(Reg) Ansett ran the company and he was very anti-women. His main reason was that he considered they wouldn't be safe," she said.

"They tried lots of arguments. That women were prone to panicking or that we would run off and have millions of babies."

Ansett even argued in the Commission that her earrings could be a safety hazard if they got caught on the side of the aircraft in the event of an emergency evacuation.

On this International Women's Day, Captain Deborah Lawrie is celebrating 50 years of flying.

She said it's only now she understands the significance of what she's achieved by flying a plane through the glass ceiling.

A photo of Deborah Lawrie from her personal collection. ( Supplied )

"I look back and I wonder how I ever did it. But you know, when you're young, you don't worry too much about the consequences. You just keep going," she said.

After taking part in the 1989 pilots' dispute, Deborah found herself out of a job along with hundreds of other Australians pilots.

She ended up in the Netherlands flying for KLM.

"It was one of the best things that ever happened to me," she said.

"The thing I was most scared about, which was losing my network actually became an international network, which was amazing."

And the Dutch airline didn't have a problem when it came to employing women pilots.

A newspaper article from Deborah Lawrie's collection of cuttings ( Supplied )

"There was no issue at all. There were already women flying around ... they had quite a number of them.

These days, Deborah is an A320 Training Captain for Tiger Airways and at 66, she is the oldest woman pilot still flying for a major commercial airline.

"There's nowhere else in the world apart from Australia and New Zealand where you can fly past an age which I was my last birthday so I am the oldest in the world," she said.

And she has no intention of retiring just yet.

"I always say another three years, but it's always another three years."

Last year, she was made a Member of the Order of Australia in the Queen's Birthday Honours for "significant service to aviation and to women in the profession".

"It was a fantastic, a complete surprise," she said.

"I felt very honoured and it was lovely to have that recognition."

As the world celebrates International Women's Day, she says things are changing and it is now much easier for young women pilots to get a job.

"I think in general society is more accepting of women going into different roles," she said.

"I know that for the first time in my entire career, I've seen a female refuelling an aircraft, which I have never seen before."