Don’t think that registering with your local job centre is a waste of time. Because this is how Kathleen – somewhat unusually for someone in the military – began her career in the army when she was almost 27 years old. Today she’s an air-traffic controller and instructor in the 3rd Combat Helicopter Regiment of the French Army! 

Kathleen, who was good at maths, passed a baccalaureate in business administration. Raised in a non-military family in the Loiret department of central France, she had spent holidays working in the bookbinding workshop that employed her parents but couldn’t see herself doing the same thing. So she pursued her studies, obtaining a two-year technological university diploma (DUT) in business management and then continuing for a third year to obtain a BA in business entrepreneurship and management. Her objective was to work for a chamber of commerce to “see the world”. 

To do so, she was aware that she needed to improve her English, so in 2013 she enrolled in Education First and spent six months in Brisbane, Australia. Living in a host family with five other young people from different countries her English quickly improved as it was the only language these youngsters had in common. “When I got home, I spoke English with a strong Australian accent,” she laughs. Unfortunately, her return to France coincided with the elimination of many job positions in chambers of commerce following the government’s decision to redraw the map of the departments and regions of France. 

So Kathleen undertook a series of casual jobs just to save enough money to go back-packing around Asia for a while with friends. It was when she got back from this trip that she received the life-changing phone call from the job centre for managers which was looking for graduates on behalf of the army and navy. “I was 25, almost 26, and I thought I was already too old, but was told that I was misinformed.” After talking it over with her boyfriend, with whom she is now in a civil partnership, she started discussions with the army, because, she laughs, “I suffer badly from motion sickness, so the navy was really not for me!”

Kathleen met with the recruiting office in June and decided in August to start the process to join up. Given her competence in English (even if she failed the recruitment test as a cryptologic linguist), her maths skills and her good three-dimensional visualisation skills, she was oriented towards becoming an air traffic controller. By the time she’d completed the paper work, passed the medical tests, and spent some time at the Army Light Aviation School (ALAT) in Luc, in the south of France to discover what air traffic controlling entails, it was March of the following year before she started the school for non-commissioned officers in Saint-Maixent “just before my 27th birthday.” Although she did notice that a few of her male colleagues made “inappropriate comments, not addressed to me but to other women, they were quickly reprimanded by the hierarchy”,  Kathleen has not suffered from sex discrimination or harassment.

Kathleen then spent a year in Mont-de-Marsan, at the Air Traffic Control and Air Defence Instruction Centre (CICDA), which trains air traffic controllers for the Army, Navy, Air and Space Force. “In my class there were four of us from the Army and I was the only female. There was one other from the Air Force,” says Kathleen, adding that there are, in fact, “numerous” female air traffic controllers in her regiment. “There are about 10 of us.” 

When they leave CICDA, air traffic controllers also have a European civil air traffic controller licence, “but that would not exempt me from having to pass more exams if I wanted to work in civil aviation.” That’s not her plan, for the moment anyway. “I’m in the military under contract until March 2025. After that I can sign a new contract with the army. So why not? What I like about the military is that I do other things besides my job as an air traffic controller.”

So what’s a typical day like for her? “I spend a maximum of four hours at a stretch in the control tower, and then there are the ancillary tasks linked more to the military side such as shooting or sports,” she says. 

In the control tower there are three job stations. “We start work with an instructor at the 'ground' station, that is to say that we manage all ground movements, whether they are aircraft or vehicles. Once you are competent, you work alone, without the instructor. Then we move onto the ‘air-ground take-off and landing’ station, first with classes and an instructor, then alone. And finally we can move to the ‘watchman’ station and that person is the team leader.” Kathleen is not yet a team leader but she is an instructor on the first two stations. 

She was deployed to Mali “during the COVID pandemic so even if we were only at our air traffic controller job for four hours a day, just like in France, we were confined to the tower and to our living quarters.”  Still, she was struck by the heat “and the sand which stretched as far as the eye could see.” Amongst her other missions: a week on a navy boat "which was quite long enough” she laughs, and guard missions. Because even if her job is an air traffic controller, she is also a soldier. 

The young woman is now wondering if “becoming an officer” might not be an option for the future because “in addition to my current duties I would have command duties,” she says dreamily. Still, she’s delighted that she got the phone call from the job centre because, amongst other things, “being in the army gives you experiences that others will never have.” Such as? “Flying with the Danish prime minister!”