Rachel Burns remembers the exact moment she knew she wanted to be a pilot. “I was 8 years old, and I had seen a disaster movie about the plight of a 747.”
Rachel, who was a guest speaker at the Air League Monaco on June 21, was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, and describes herself as an energetic kid, playing netball, the piano and joining the Air Training Corps run by the Royal Air Force.
As a captain for British Airways, she is the first in her family to enter the aviation field. “There are scholarships out there that require zero flight experience, and you only need English and Maths at GCSE or brevet level to get into those courses. But higher educational qualifications help to make you stand out amongst the applicants for very few places.” Rachel graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Durham University and went to get her Airline Transport Pilots Licence (ATPL), which you need in order to become a commercial pilot.
The mother of two started working for BA in 1998 and has remained with the airline ever since. “In 1997, BA footed the cost for my cadetship. I spent around 18 months training before I joined the company. BA paid for my training, and I was bonded to the company for the first 5 years of employment.”
Rachel recalls her first passenger flight as surreal. “Everything is exactly the same as the simulator until you see the passengers. Then the terror sets in!”
She credits her most beautiful in-flight moment to the day she passed her command check. “At the end of the flight, the training captain gave me my captain’s stripes and told me to go and say goodbye to the passengers. Then he made an announcement to the passengers that they were saying goodbye and thank you to British Airways’ newest captain. After the huge amount of work and effort to achieve the rank, it was such a touching moment, and the passengers all congratulated me as they disembarked.”
And with so many hours in her logbook, she is sympathetic to passengers who have a fear of flying. “It’s an unknown to many people. In a car you can see out of the windscreen the world ahead of you but in a plane, you see very little through the window so it’s hard to get that sense of what’s going on and it causes a feeling of loss of control and panic. It’s a shame people can’t come to the flight deck any more during the flight because in the days before 9/11 frightened passengers could come and see what’s actually going on and with was the full horizon rather than the partial view of either land or sky that you see through a window.
“We cured many a nervous flier back then. Also, you should think of turbulence as a potholed or cobbled street. The car bounces as it goes over it and may dip into a pothole but you’re still supported by the road. It’s the same in the air. The unsettled air causes bumps under the wings and that feels like the bumpy road.”
Over the years, her nerves of steel have served her well. Once she operated a flight from Heathrow to Denver with one of the air conditioning packs not working. Normally two packs working at a higher flow rate was equal to all three working in the basic mode. It was hot on the plane, and she expected it to cool once the engines were running and the aircraft airborne. It never cooled. “It was 29°C throughout the plane. The crew took off their ties and unbuttoned the tops of the shirts. I had to walk through the cabin to explain to people the situation. It was fantastic to see the turnaround in the passengers’ attitude when they spoke to the pilot. Initially they were largely angry and frustrated but by the end they were all having a fun bonding experience laughing about having cocktails and suggesting new crew uniforms including grass skirts or shorts. We landed in Denver and got off the plane to 30°C weather!”
Since the birth of her children, Rachel has worked 50% part time, taking work trips during a 14-day period then having 14 days off. She explains that a full-time roster will be around six 3- or 4-day trips or four to five longer trips. “When you’re on ‘home standby’ you need to be able to reach the airport within two hours. As I live abroad – outside of Nice – this means on home standby I have to be in a hotel near Heathrow. For short-haul crews there is also ‘airport standby’ where pilots have to wait at the airport to fill in for uncrewed flights immediately.”
By law, pilots can only be at the controls of an aircraft for a certain number of hours. “On long flights we have a spare pilot who takes over from one of the operating pilots to enable them to have a break. The break is taken in a bunk. On the 777 the flight crew (pilot) bunk is above the first few rows of seats. The cabin crew have bunks at the back of the plane in the roof above the last few rows of seats.”
According to the British Airways Gender Pay Gap Report 2023, the UK’s flag carrier has approximately 6.6% female pilots, which is above the national average of 5%. In 2023, the airline introduced the Speedbird Academy, a fully-funded pilot programme, to support our drive to improve representation in the pilot community. “When I joined in 1998, there were less than 50 females out of about 2,800 total pilots, which equates to just over 1%. As a women pilot, I do think I have to work harder and be better in order to be taken seriously although whether that is my perception or genuinely required is up for debate,” says Rachel.
“It is a male dominated environment but I have always been a bit of a tomboy, so I fit in anyway. I only ever once experienced offensive sexism at my time at BA. It was from a male captain who later lost his command due to incompetence. Karma is sweet!”
Rachel adds that the sexism she encountered came from outside the industry. “Before I became a pilot, people used to say it was an impossible job for me. At school or talking to people in general, there was a lot of opposition.”
And if she had listened to the naysayers? “I would have been a primary school teacher. I’m glad I never had to be though!”
Article first published June 23, 2024. Photos courtesy of Vanessa Ilsley.
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