In a world where around six per cent of pilots are female, former airline captain Emma Henderson knows that she was flying against the odds when she embarked upon her chosen career.
The 53-year-old, originally from Essex, has been fascinated with things that fly since early childhood, and says her interest really took off when she saw the Space Shuttle Enterprise touch down with a Boeing 747 at Stansted Airport in 1983.
‘I looked up and thought, “I want to fly that”, but I wanted to fly the space shuttle, not the Boeing!’ Henderson tells the Daily Mail.
After being gifted a trial flight for her 18th birthday, the Brit realised she wanted to be an airline pilot not an astronaut.
At the time, much like today, the training fees were very expensive but Henderson discovered her university’s Air Squadron was offering free flying lessons.
It was there that she met her now husband, and after graduating she stopped flying at 22 to become an Air Force wife.
The mother-of-three moved to New Zealand in 2003 with her family and took the opportunity to gain her commercial flying licenses whilst her husband was posted there.
‘There are a lot of pilots in New Zealand, and a lot of them are women, so it wasn’t that unusual to be a female pilot there, and I got nothing but support from everybody I met, which was amazing,’ Henderson explains, revealing her training at a local flying club cost £80,000.
The former captain, who is now a professional speaker, was 36 when she finally landed her first job with an airline and says being slightly older and already having her children meant she didn’t get the same ‘stick’ that some younger women might face.
It hasn’t always been a smooth journey though, with the captain recounting ‘two occasions in my entire career where I was spoken to in a way that made me feel like I shouldn’t be there’.
Emma Henderson MBE is a former airline captain with decades of flying experience
One incident happened after a simulator debrief meeting at a hotel.
‘We would stay in a hotel, go in the simulator, and quite often if the debrief was going to fall over dinner, we would go back to the hotel for dinner and a drink and debrief over dinner, just so we would eat at a normal time’ she explains.
‘On this occasion we’d had our dinner and the debrief, we were sat having a drink in the bar. The captain went to bed and the instructor put his arm around me and said, “Would you like to finish our debriefing in my room?”‘
Henderson says she told him: ‘No, I wouldn’t, and if you ever try that again I’m coming for you,’ adding she ‘was just not going to tolerate that sort of behaviour’.
During another situation, in a training simulator, she introduced herself to the instructor and shared she had three children and lived in Scotland.
‘The guy just looked at me and went, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at home with your children?”,’ Henderson says.
‘That was before we went into the simulator and I was already feeling quite sad that I’d had to say goodbye to them, and I didn’t know when I was going to see them next.’
The former pilot says she realised later that the instructor hadn’t been against her flying – but that the loss of his wife had made his perspective change.
He said: ‘My wife died a while ago and I regret the fact I didn’t spend more time at home, with my children’. He was, she adds, ‘projecting his angst onto me’.
Seeing the Space Shuttle Enterprise touch down with a Boeing 747 at Stansted Airport in 1983 was an inspiring moment for Henderson
Still, the situation left her feeling ‘really worthless’ and she flagged the issue, highlighting ‘a man wouldn’t have been asked that, so why would I be asked that as a woman?’. Henderson spoke with another instructor about it and the problem was handled, she says.
With both instances, her male colleagues were equally as disgusted with the behaviour.
After more than a decade in the skies, she hung up her wings in 2020, when she took voluntary redundancy.
She hopes that young girls dreaming of a job at 30,000ft will find a more balanced environment.
‘All the manuals that we read when I was doing my type rating referred to the pilot as “he”, and there’s no need for that, it can easily be “they”, she says. ‘But things have changed a lot since I started flying.’
The uniform wasn’t always suitably made for female pilots either.
‘Uniform, for example, never fits you,’ Henderson says. ‘If you’re flat chested, no problem at all because uniforms are made for men and then they just give you smaller sizes for women.’
Henderson, who hails from Essex but now lives in Scotland, says she had a ‘wonderful’ career in aviation but it’s still not entirely plain sailing for women in the industry
Henderson published Grounded in 2024
To make matters worse, the pilot describes how the ‘shirts are often quite see-through’ and ‘then you’ve got to buy a vest to wear under them’.
‘I suppose some airlines are better at that than others, I know some airlines have culottes for women to wear,’ she adds.
Another hidden battle for many female pilots is changing names on licenses after getting married, although it’s not one Henderson has come across personally.
‘If you get married, it’s really hard to change your name on your license,’ she explains, adding you have to pay a fee. ‘So that’s a hidden cost of being a woman.’
More women are flying aeroplanes, helicopters and other aircraft than ever before, according to data released by the UK Civil Aviation Authority.
In fact, there was a 26 per cent increase in the number of pilot licenses issued to women between 2019 and 2023.
However, licenses for women still make up under 10 per cent of the total in the UK.
Henderson published Grounded, a book about her aviation career in 2024, and admits she ‘was definitely a minority,’ especially as a captain, a role she says has a very small number of females.
‘As I went through my career, I noticed a big upsurge in female pilots coming through, which was great to see.’
After taking voluntary redundancy in 2020, the former captain could soon be returning to the industry as an instructor for her local flying club
Still, Henderson thinks if she looked back through her logbook there would be a couple of years before she flew with another woman.
‘I was always flying with men, they were always good fun to be honest with you, because I was a bit older we were all the same sort of age and talking about mortgages and kids,’ she adds.
Despite the occasional testing situation along the way, Henderson describes her career as being ‘wonderful’.
‘I have to say the majority of the people I flew with have become my really good friends over the years, so I’ve been really lucky,’ she says.
Henderson went on to found Project Wingman in 2020, which provided wellbeing lounges for NHS staff on the frontline during the pandemic. She went on to be awarded an MBE for her charity work in 2021.
She now has plans to return to the aviation industry as an instructor for her local flying club which she hopes to do by early autumn.
‘I have been asked to go back flying,’ Henderson reveals. ‘I still have a license, and I’ve been asked to go back and be a flying instructor at a local flying club, so I’m going to reinstate my medical and stand the instructor rating back up.’
For other women hoping to break into the industry, Henderson says, ‘The best advice I can give is that an airplane doesn’t know what gender the pilot is.’
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