Failing her pilot’s test twice should have been the end of the road for Mandy Hickson, but the determined woman went on to become one of the first RAF female fast jet pilots.
Ms Hickson, who is on her first trip to Malta, was the second woman to fly a Tornado GR4 on the front line, completing three tours of duty and 45 missions over Iraq.
Having first become interested in flying aged 13, she soon set her eyes on her chosen career and received an RAF flying scholarship, allowing her to gain a private pilot’s licence by the age of 18.
“At this time, there were some fairly large obstacles in my way. Firstly, women were not allowed to be fast jet pilots in the RAF. The second, rather large barrier, was the fact that when they did open the doors to women [in 1992], I went on to fail all the aptitude tests to become a pilot.
“I had approximately 200 hours of flying under my belt by this stage and I was devastated,” she recounted, ahead of a workshop in Malta on managing critical business risks.
Fortunately, the squadron commander at a university club believed that Ms Hickson had the potential to make it to the front line.
Your confidence is the one thing that ebbs away, leaving self-doubt instead. However, confidence is like a muscle and needs to be exercised
“He requested that two impartial flying examiners come and assess me. They both graded me as being above average, so now there was a mismatch.”
Eventually she was taken on as a test case.
“They could not understand why a lot of women that were taking the tests were failing them, compared to their male counterparts, and they wanted to see if perhaps the testing system was biased or flawed in some way,” she said.
Making it to the cockpit was not her last hurdle. Ms Hickson found it a bit daunting to return to work following maternity leave.
“Your confidence is the one thing that ebbs away, leaving self-doubt instead. However, confidence is like a muscle and needs to be exercised.”
The second she returned to the cockpit, her hands moved straight back to the controls and switches, and she could feel her confidence flowing back.
During her later years within the RAF, she was asked to give talks at local schools. She enjoyed the opportunity to try changing the mindset that flying fast jets in the RAF was simply a job for men.
“There are so few women [approximately five] who have flown the Tornado GR4 on the front line , and I believe it is important to create strong female role models for young people to look up to. Not necessarily to aspire to be a pilot, but to simply think: if she can do it, so can I.”
Ms Hickson is now transferring the lessons she learnt in the cockpit to the corporate sector. She is a renowned keynote speaker in the business and education sectors, and will today be giving a speech at a business workshop organised by Ultimate Performance Academy.
“I can then be really honest and simply say that I was at a dinner party. We all had a little bit too much to drink, and I was telling the story of an operational mission over Iraq when we had a close encounter with a surface-to-air missile. It just so happened that someone at the dinner party organised conferences and was holding one in a few months’ time.
“I was asked to speak at Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire as my first-ever event… Let’s just say the rest is history.”
When a pilot is flying over an enemy border and things do not go according to plan, there is already a strategy in place for the circumstances that could constitute a crisis situation. In fact, during her Business Navigation sessions, one of the areas Ms Hickson focuses on is threat management for businesses.