Flight Lieutenant Lauriane

Lauriane. Note the anti-g trousers worn on top of her flying suit. Photo credit: French Air and Space Force.

When she was a little girl Lauriane wanted to “pilot a pink aeroplane.” Obviously, the Mirage 2000-D that she is piloting 25 years later is not pink, but she accepts that! The only female fighter pilot today on Air Base 133 Nancy-Ochey, this jovial young woman has just qualified as an operational pilot and will be leaving for her first operational mission in the next two months. "A foreign mission is the finality of our training so I’m quite excited and not too apprehensive because I'm not jumping into the great unknown. This is what we've been trained for."

Brought up in Brittany with her father in the Navy, she thought until her last year of secondary school that she would be a naval pilot. "But at the Naval lycée [secondary school] I was able to look in detail at the differences between the Armed Forces and I realised that in the Navy one is a sailor first and foremost and, even if I am Breton, I didn’t want to go to sea!" And she adds that "the Air and Space Force is young and very feminised and that corresponded more to me than the Navy."

With her science baccalaureate in hand, the preparation at the Naval lycée for the competitive exams to get into the military officer training academies went smoothly. "The good thing about military lycées is they prepare you specifically for the entrance exams of the military academies and particularly to the oral exams that are a little different from those of the other engineering and business ‘grandes écoles’. And then, of course, there is the specific physical training," she laughs.

““It’s a career that little girls don’t dream about””

Although as a youngster she had played handball and been a horse rider, Lauriane was still in trouble when it came to pull-ups. “The other girls were also having trouble and we couldn't see how we could improve when we couldn't even manage to do a single pull-up!" Advised by their coach, the girls inverted the exercise: instead of trying to pull themselves above the bar, they put the bar lower and started the exercise leaning on top of the bar and lowering themselves underneath it as slowly as possible. "That develops exactly the same muscles as a regular pull-up and so after a while we could do the exercise the right way round," she explains delightedly.

Our conversation is drowned out for a few moments by aircraft roaring to take-off from Lauriane’s air base into an amazingly blue February sky.

Does sports help one deal with the gravitational force (commonly called g-force) that pilots are submitted to during flight? "It helps to have some resistance but," she says, the important thing "is above all, habituation. When we return after a month’s holiday we are very careful during the first flights because you quickly lose this habituation.”

Very pedagogical, Lauriane explains that when the aircraft is put through tight, fast accelerations the pilot’s blood is drawn down towards their feet. The result: their brain is no longer sufficiently irrigated. “First you get tunnel vision, then it becomes darker – this is a greyout – then you can't see at all – that's  black-out but you're still conscious, you can still hear. And then you go into ‘g-lock’ which means that you momentarily lose consciousness and if your aircraft is flying at a low altitude that can be fatal. "

But there are countermeasures. First the pilot’s seat is inclined backwards so that the body is more horizontal which helps the blood circulate better. Then the flight crew wear anti-g trousers on top of their flying suits and this, once connected to the aircraft, will inflate during manoeuvres and tighten around the legs thereby impeding the blood from pooling at the pilots’ feet. And then, and Lauriane demonstrates while she tells me, there is a particular method of breathing. “You block your breath, you contract your abdominal and leg muscles, you exhale rapidly and then re-block." With these three measures "a pilot can cope with 9 g" whilst an untrained person would not be able to put up with more than 5 g.

Is a woman less resistant to these g-forces when she's having her period? “Not in my experience and no other female pilot or navigator has mentioned it to me either," she answers adding that in any case "before every flight we have what we call a ‘g-warmup’ to establish what kind of flight we will be able to cope with. Sometimes a young parent hasn't slept very well the previous night so we adapt the flights as a result."

Another subject rarely mentioned: how does one urinate during a long flight? "I've just tested a new system developed for U.S. Air Force female pilots. It is the AMXD (aircrew mission extender device) which is like a sanitary pad but with inflatable edges so that it stays watertight. Sensors in the pad detect any urine within a second and a pump is activated to collect the urine in a bag. It's much more comfortable than the nappies we had to wear until now!"

Lauriane about to clamber aboard the Mirage 2000-D. Photo credit: French Air and Space Force

Lauriane is delighted to be piloting a Mirage 2000 D. "It's the plane I used to dream about," she exclaims, adding that she wanted to fly in a twin seat aircraft and that the air to ground mission this aircraft specialises in is "what I preferred.”

Her secondary school teachers who, surprised when she said she wanted to be a fighter pilot, would be surprised to see her today. Other people, "a minority", would tell her that her dream was "unattainable" – an attitude which partly explains why there are so few female fighter pilots in France. Today, there are only four or five in combat squadrons. Other factors, Lauriane believes, are that "it's a career that little girls don't dream about and also they don't want to undergo such long training” which will lead them to being fully operational at an age where many of them might be thinking about starting a family. It's a life choice. She has classmates from the Air Force Academy who have chosen to be transport pilots because this is more compatible with family life.

Her partner is also a fighter pilot but neither of them are yet ready to start a family. Lauriane is only 29, she has time. “I can’t stop for a year. We’re like top level athletes who have spent years training so if we stop it's really hard to return." But she also knows that this is only the first part of her career. After a few years of flying she will find herself behind a desk where the weak g-forces are more compatible with founding a family!

The Mirage 2000-D. Photo credit: Paul Schaller