Mandy Hickson was the UK’s second female Tornado GR4 pilot. She has the personality one would expect from a woman who had to beat her own path towards a goal she’d been told as a girl was unattainable. She’s lucid, funny and very charismatic. And not somebody you mess with.

As befits a former combat pilot, she is right on schedule for our FaceTime meeting although she’s in a track suit and still glowing after her 45-minute morning intensive workout doing something I’d never even heard of: spinning. But Mandy clearly loves it and after an hour of conversation with her I can see that it might suit her temperament. “I’d always adored sports, was a county netball player, did tennis, hockey and every other sport that came my way.” She also loved biology so studying the very new discipline of “Sports Science” at Birmingham University in the early 1990s suited her perfectly. 

“It was my mum who suggested I join the air training corps when I was 13. My first ever flight was in a Chipmunk aircraft and I just fell in love with flying. But I was not so enamoured with the air training corps so thought the RAF would not be for me. In any case I’d been told that women could not be fighter pilots.”

She was awarded an RAF flying scholarship when she was 17 “but needed another 10 hours of flying to get my private pilot’s licence so I paid for them myself with earnings from my newspaper round!” So when a friend dared her to join the university air squadron she saw it largely as a means of maintaining her private pilot’s licence. “But I actually loved the air squadron and found a lot of respect there. They really show you the best side of the Royal Air Force [RAF],” she says with her quick laugh. So then she became desperate to join the RAF but the no-female-pilot rule still stood.

“And then in my second year they changed the rules,” she exclaims as though she still finds it hard to believe. But there were computer-based tests to pass and she failed them...twice! Her squadron leader was puzzled because she was the best pilot he had so an investigation was launched “and we discovered that 70% of the women were failing the tests but 70% of the men were passing them, because they’d been designed by men for men.” Her squadron leader escalated the issue up to the top authorities who finally offered her a commission as an air traffic controller.

“That wasn’t at all what I wanted to do,” she recounts, but she accepted anyway as it was a “foot in the door” and continued to make her case until she finally got a commission as a pilot.

“They took me on as a test case, a fact I discovered because they told a friend of mine that they’d taken on a woman as they wanted to see ‘how far she could go before she failed’. She didn’t know it was me! But it planted a seed of doubt in my mind.” She was the only woman in her squadron but throughout training “the boys were like my brothers.” At the end of the training there was a flying exercise they could attempt three times. “That little seed of doubt was germinating. I’d failed twice, and thought this was where I was going to get my comeuppance. I wasn’t eating or sleeping and was sitting in my room with my cardboard flight deck practising, when one of my mates walked in and was adamant that I go with him. So I followed him onto the parade ground where I found all my other colleagues on bicycles and we practised the whole exercise on bikes!! Finally, the penny dropped and I understood where I was going wrong. The next day I passed!” This kind of camaraderie “is what they nurture in the RAF,” she adds. “That sort of support: ‘Mandy’s struggling, let’s get her through’ is what you need in a combat situation,” she explains.

She admits that being 1.83m tall “and quite loud” she spent the first six months “fitting in, being boysy, drinking too much, ordering two half-pints in the officers’ mess when I’d been told that women could not order pints! And then one day a French air force officer told my colleagues that ‘you Brits have a lot to learn about women’ and that made me think: ‘it’s really important that I bring my true self to work, not constantly trying to be someone I’m not.” 

She spent 17 years in the RAF but never ranked higher than Flight Lieutenant. “That’s because of the choices I made,” she says lucidly. “I lost a baby when I was still flying because I didn’t realise I was pregnant and as we wanted children I asked for a ground job. Then they were going to post me to Afghanistan but by then I had my two boys [now 17 and 18 but toddlers at the time] so I took a job at Boscombe Down where there were no promotions as it was a ground tour of duty.”

Mandy left the RAF on her 38th birthday “with a pension and absolutely no regrets” she laughs. Since then she’s retrained as a Human Factors facilitator working for the Civil Aviation Authority, has become a prolific keynote speaker, founded Women for Work to help women realise their full potential and is a performance coach. Oh yes, she’s also written a book “An Officer, not a Gentleman” that has sold 12,000 copies! And she’s not yet 50