A successful hairdresser
As the youngest of four sisters and having left school aged 15 to pursue a career as a hairdresser, few would have believed that 24 years later Barbara Harmer would be regularly piloting an aircraft worth £107 million packed with celebrities across the Atlantic.
As told in the bookazine – Concorde Supersonic Speedbird – The Full Story, Barbara was born in Loughton, Epping Forest, Essex, in 1953 but soon moved to Bognor Regis, West Sussex. Her father was a commercial artist and her mother a haberdasher. Barbara was sent to a Catholic convent school and taught by nuns. She always described herself as a rebel even though she later admitted that the discipline she`d been taught stood her in good stead during the years to come.
“If the nuns had known I was going to be a pilot they’d have said, ‘Don’t be so ridiculous’,” she later recalled.
Although she was a successful hairdresser, young Barbara found herself feeling bored and unchallenged. Having stuck it out for five years, she resolved to improve the situation and got herself a position training to become an air traffic controller at Gatwick Airport. At the same time, she began studying to get some A- levels under her belt with the goal of eventually earning herself a law degree.
She said: “I just ordered the syllabuses from the examining boards, bought the recommended texts and looked at past papers. I did it all by myself, with no tuition.”
Pilot’s licence
But the longer she spent around aircraft the more she wanted to take to the air herself. Gradually, her ambitious plan to enter the legal profession began to change, She started saving up every spare penny she could muster, £5000 in total, so she could pay for flying lessons and earn herself a pilot’s licence. This wasn’t enough so she took out a loan for another £10,000 to make it happen.
She took the controls of an aircraft, a Cessna, for the first time on Dec. 26, 1975. Once she’d got the licence, she got a new job as a flying instructor at Goodwood Flying School. This though, was still not enough. Barbara’s single minded determination led her to spend two years studying for a commercial pilot’s licence by correspondence course. She passed in May 1982.
Actually joining the world of civil aviation as a pilot was more difficult than she had imagined, however. She sent off application after application, only to have each one rejected in turn. All the while though, her experience as a pilot grew. Then, after more than 100 applications, she was successful. Genair, a small commuter airline that had recently relocated from Liverpool Airport to Humberside and forged close links with British Caledonian took her on. During her time with the firm she flew piston engined Embraer EMB 110 Bandeirantes and Short SD.330s.
Four months before Genair went into receivership in July 1984, Barbara moved on to British Caledonian where she had her first experience of jet airliners flying the BAC One-Eleven before moving on to the larger McDonnell Douglas DC-10. This lasted another four years before Caledonian merged with British Airways and Barbara had a new employer.
The only female Brit ever to fly Concorde Mach 2 Airliner
BA had nearly 3000 pilots on its books at the time but only 40 of them were women The firm only started recruiting female pilots in 1987. Barbara was chosen for the intensive £100,000 six-month conversion course for Concorde in 1992 – this time though she didn’t have to pay for it herself. Now she was earning £37,000 a year – the equivalent of £64,000 today – with ambitions to become a captain earning £64,000 (£103,500).
Barbara made history on Mar. 25, 1993, when she flew as first officer on a British Airways Concorde from London’s Heathrow to JFK airport in New York. Not long after she’d begun regular flights she told an interviewer: “When you apply the power, you feel a nudge in your back and it goes off down the runway like a scalded cat. You can’t believe the acceleration.”
Flying at high altitude wasn’t quite so exciting however: “Concorde is so smooth it doesn’t really get the adrenalin going – but there’s nothing else like it in the world. Even pilots stop and stare. It has an aura about it.”
BA’s only female Concorde pilot
Barbara remained BA’s only woman Concorde pilot to make regular flights for a decade, until October 2003 when it was withdrawn from regular commercial service, in the wake of the catastrophic accident to an Air France Concorde in July 2000.
During that time, her famous passengers included Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, Eric Clapton, Sarah Brightman, Lord David Owen and Baroness Margaret Thatcher. Everything was fine for most of these journeys but Thatcher got a rough ride. Barbara later said: “She was travelling under an assumed name in Concorde back from New York in February. My landing at Heathrow was my worst ever. I thought, ‘I hope they don’t tell her it’s a female at the controls. I’d hate her to think we can’t cope’.
In May 1999 she flew the Manchester United squad to Barcelona to play Bayern Munichin the Champions League final. “I felt quite emotional as I taxied the Concorde out on to the runway,” she remembered later, “with British flags flying and thousands of people wishing the team luck on the way.”
In 2001, another woman, an Air France pilot named Béatrice Vialle, became the second female to fly Concorde on regular routes by making some 35 trips between Paris and New York before the service was finally withdrawn. Only one other woman flew Concorde, French test pilot Jacqueline Auriol, and then only during its development phase.
After Concorde
After Concorde, Barbara stayed on with BA retraining to fly Boeing 777s until she took voluntary redundancy in 2009. Flying fast jets wasn’t Barbara’s only passion however. She enjoyed driving fast cars, skiing, cycling long distance, gardening and playing tennis. She was even a fully qualified offshore yacht master and had planned to take part in a transatlantic event in her French-built 10.5m Archambault 35 in 2013. It was not to be however. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2009 and died at St Wilfrid’s Hospice in Chichester on Feb. 20, 2011, aged 57. A public memorial service was held at Chichester Cathedral.
Concorde Supersonic Speedbird – The Full Story is published by Mortons Books and is available to order here.
Photo by BA Press Office
