She has done a loop-the-loop in a plane with no doors, survived an engine fire, and held it together during an emergency landing at Perth airport.
As a flight attendant in the 1950s and '60s, Betty Foster endured many hair-raising experiences as she explored Western Australia from the air and on the ground — from betting on the Yalgoo races in 1961 to shooting fish in the mud of a tidal flat in Derby in 1962.
The photographs she took along the way, on an East German Werra camera with Kodachrome film, were the catalyst for National Geographic to come to Australia for the first time, she told Christine Layton on ABC Radio Perth.
It was at a time when the Western Australian life and landscape remained unseen in many parts of the world.
"There was nobody bringing home any coloured photographs. They were all black and white in the '50s. And it was an expensive thing to do to take these slides."
Luckily, Ms Foster — who was based in Perth — said her parents did not charge her for board so she had money to spend on taking photographs on her thrice-weekly flights from Perth into northern WA with MacRoberston Miller Airlines (MMA).
Her photographs also showed the fashion of the times and the adventures had by a group of young pilots and flight attendants in frontier WA.
As well as capturing scenes on the ground, Ms Foster held the lens of her camera to the window of a silver propeller plane, a Douglas DC-3, capturing aerial photos of rivers, estuaries, and remote station settlements in northern WA, as well as snapshots of post-war Perth from above.
At one stage Ms Foster crossed paths with author, adventurer, and photographer Alan Villiers, the captain of the Mayflower II on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic, and showed him her work.
He sent a handful of her slides to National Geographic magazine.
The next day the magazine asked him to send 200.
According to the State Library of Western Australia, Ms Foster's images inspired the magazine to visit Australia in 1963.
Some of her photos also appeared in the September issue of National Geographic that year.
Geoffrey Thomas, aviation editor for The West Australian newspaper, said Ms Foster paved the way for aerial photographers today.
"Betty pioneered all of that," he said.
Ms Foster said many of the pilots at the time had honed their flying skills in the war, flying planes like Spitfires and Hurricanes. She said they used to share their wartime stories with her.
As well as her years photographing Western Australia, Ms Foster spent four years taking photographs overseas, where the adventures continued.
She was held up by soldiers with guns going through East Germany and was in Washington DC at the time of John F Kennedy's assassination.
Her images have now been published in a book entitled A Bird's Eye View.
When she stopped working as a flight attendant, Ms Foster said she was too busy to miss her high-flying days exploring Western Australia.
"Well, I married and had four children," she said.
"It wasn't until they'd all left home that I brought out the slides."
Ms Foster has made sure the images will be available for the public to view long into the future by donating her slides to the JS Battye Library.
