Flying in the face of adversity

As the second ever female fast jet pilot with the Royal Air Force (RAF), Mandy Hickson is used to having a few barriers thrown in the way. From the time she was a teenager, she dreamed of joining the RAF, but it took courage and sheer determination to get there.

Before Mandy got to the “Top Gun” stage of flying £35m fighter jets in hostile territory, she had to earn her wings. By all accounts this is a tough slog which requires you to be not just an adrenaline junkie, but also an aero-nautical mechanics enthusiast, a leader, a team player and an athlete.

After her GCSE’s Mandy applied to for an RAF scholarship which would enable her to log 30 hours of flying experience at no cost to herself, meaning she wouldn’t be far off the required 40 hours to earn a private pilot’s license. So 16-year-old Mandy decided to give it a shot and was accepted for the scholarship on one condition; that she sort out her obesity problem. The RAF’s height chart went up to just 5’ 8’’ for women, Mandy is 6’. So the medical examiner added on some pounds for her extra height. At 12 stone, she was deemed to be obese. She was told that if she got down to under 10 stone she would be able to do the scholarship.

“I’m really fit and healthy but I always think I’m fat, so I’m always on a diet. I think it comes from being told at the age of 16 that I was obese. I literally did not eat anything but chicken and broccoli for four months so that I could get the scholarship. I went to the gym before and after school every day and kept up all my sports activities,” Mandy told Irish Country Living. “I look back now and think, ‘Why didn’t I challenge that? Why didn’t my parents challenge that?’ But the ‘speak up’ culture wasn’t there in the 1990s.”

The four-month diet worked and Mandy got to do the scholarship. By the age of 18 she had her private pilot’s license and was able to take her family flying in a PA28 from Blackpool airport.

From there, she went on to do a degree in geography and sports science at the University of Birmingham. Mandy went through an interview process to join the University of Birmingham Air Squadron and managed to squeeze in plenty of flying between lectures, sport and parties. In her second year it was announced that the RAF was going to take on female pilots for the first time.

Despite the fact that Mandy was able to win a university aerobatics competition, beating three RAF-sponsored pilots, they wouldn’t take her on as a pilot because she failed the aptitude tests twice. They offered her a place in the RAF training school to become an air traffic controller. To accept it you had to sign up for 12 years’ service and Mandy still dreamt of being a pilot. In the end, she signed up in the hope that she would be able to transfer to the pilot section.

I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I was just doing it because I loved flying and I wanted to be in the RA

She went through the boot-polishing, marching and weapons training to become a soldier in the RAF. Then she got the news that they had decided to let her switch from air traffic control to the pilot section. What she didn’t know was that she had been taken on as a test case to see how far she would get before she failed. Other women had taken the aptitude tests to be an RAF pilot and failed, Mandy was to become a trailblazer for all those women who would come after her.

“I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I was just doing it because I loved flying and I wanted to be in the RAF. I think if you can be that role model, especially to get young girls to think outside the box in terms of their career, then you definitely should. I go round to schools and speak to students about my career now, but back then I was just one of the lads.”

As Mandy’s training progressed in the RAF, the fact that she hadn’t passed the aptitude tests did niggle at her consciousness and keep her awake at night coming up to her final flight tests to earn her wings. A bit of a confidence boost from one of her instructors, rather than the expected tough love, helped get her through and Mandy became a fully fledged RAF pilot. She had also garnered the nickname of Big Bird at this stage, not quite the “Maverick” or “Goose” you expect from the Top Gun film.

From then on, training became focused on weapons, bombing, air-to-air combat and battle formations. There was a lot of studying involved including; the mathematics of when to release a bomb, how each aircraft you are flying actually works and memorising emergency procedures. Before you get to fly a £35m tornado jet you have to test your mettle in a simulator.

I saw it time after time, there was so much unconscious bias

As a tornado pilot, Mandy joined her first operational squadron based at RAF Marham. On her first day she noticed that all of the calendars and computer screensavers were pictures of naked women. No woman had ever been part of II (AC) Squadron before. So Mandy changed all the computer screensavers to pictures of naked men. By the next day, they were all lovely landscape pictures.

“I saw it time after time, there was so much unconscious bias. It wasn’t vindictive, they just weren’t used to having a female pilot.”

Mandy flew 50 combat missions across three tours in the Gulf during her time in the RAF. She is still one of only five female Tornado GR4 pilots in the UK. She spent 17 years in the RAF, seven years as a volunteer reservist and logged almost 2,000 flying hours.

After she retired from active service, Mandy trained as an airline pilot. Her husband Craig, who was also in the RAF, had already gone through this process and was flying for EasyJet.

“He had a really tough schedule. I wanted to be a mum to our two children and not try to juggle two hectic schedules with childminding. A friend of mine asked me to speak at a conference as I had told her a story about being shot at in the desert.”

So Mandy did a 20-minute speech at the end of her friend’s conference to give the audience “a bit of a lift” at the end of the day. Afterwards she put together a show reel of stories about her time in the RAF and practised them on strangers. One day, on a family skiing holiday, someone asked her what she did for a living and Mandy told them she was a “keynote speaker”. Next thing you know she had landed her second conference gig. “Fake it till you make it,” laughs Mandy.

I’ve always been a really confident and extroverted person. I really enjoy storytelling and there is a skill to it

At that second conference Miriam González Durántez, married to MP Nick Clegg, was in the audience. She was in the process of setting up the charity “Inspiring the Future” and she asked Mandy to do speeches in schools for the charity.

“I’ve always been a really confident and extroverted person. I really enjoy storytelling and there is a skill to it. When I first started speaking in the RAF I was told I wasn’t good at it, and what you are told in your 20s is what you believe so I accepted that,” said Mandy. However, she is now a full-time motivational speaker and tells her story to thousands of people all around the world. This year she released her book An Officer. Not a Gentleman.

“It is all about overcoming adversity, not about being a woman in a man’s world. My literary agent and I gave it as an exclusive to one of the major publishers. However its board said that ‘Plane books are read by men who would have no interest in a woman’s story’.”

So Mandy went down the route of self-publishing and just a few weeks in she has sold over 1,000 copies. She has deliberately left out a lot of technical RAF jargon and details of aeroplanes because “that’s not the story, I wanted it to be about the human experience. I get frustrated when people try to put you in a box and my story is about inspiring others to be able rewrite who they are at any stage in life.”

The book is available on Amazon.co.uk for £9.99 (€11.16) plus postage.