For the record, 'aviator' is a gender-neutral term.
Wikipedia has a 'List of Aviators', which has both kinds of aviators in it.
In my Oxford Dictionary, an aviator is 'a pilot'. An aviatrix is 'a female pilot'.
The online Merriam-Webster has aviatrix as 'a woman who is an aviator', coined around 1910.
So if you want to go out on a limb and convey the sense of 'Actual women! Actually flying!', go ahead and use 'aviatrix' and 'aviatrices'. My guess is that the newspapers invented the words for exactly those headlines.
It is foolish to think you can determnine the meaning of modern English words by reference to what Greeks and Romans were supposedly saying thousands of years ago. A television is not a telescope. Phugoid oscillations have nothing to do with law enforcement.
And surely all those thousands of years ago, aviation was for birds, not people. I did a year of history at school, so I must be an expert!
