In the left seat: the women flight-testing Halcyon's ships

When I joined Halcyon's flight test programme from our Nairobi campus, I was one of two women on a roster of nineteen test pilots. Today we are nine out of twenty-four. That change did not happen by accident, and it is not finished.

I flew my first certification sortie in an Aurora Mk II. It is a single-seat courier, 28 metres long, with a fusion drive that reaches 1,450 km/s. There is no co-pilot to share the workload; it is you, the ship and the instruments. The day I signed the final envelope-expansion report, the chief test pilot asked me to lead the next programme. That kind of trust changes careers.

Three things made the difference for us. First, a training pipeline that starts early. The Sparrow Trainer, at 4.1 million credits, made it affordable for our partner flight schools in Nairobi and Oceania to put more students into real cockpits. Many of our recent applicants started in a Sparrow at sixteen.

Second, equipment that fits. For decades, cockpits were sized around a narrow range of body types. Our human factors team redesigned seats, harnesses and pressure suits with a much wider range of measurements. It sounds basic. It mattered enormously.

Third, visible role models. When a young pilot sees someone like her flying a prototype or leading a certification campaign, the job stops being hypothetical. I visit schools whenever I can, and I always bring flight footage.

There is also a business case, if anyone needs one. Diverse test teams catch problems that uniform teams miss. Our redesigned harness, for example, began as a complaint from a pilot whose shoulders were narrower than the old design assumed. The fix improved comfort and crash protection for everyone. A test programme exists to find what is wrong before customers do, and that works best when the people testing look like the people who will fly the ships.

What still needs to change? Mentoring is uneven, and too many women leave flight operations after their first decade. We are piloting a structured mentoring programme across our campuses and at L5. If you are a pilot considering a career in flight test, my message is simple: apply. We need you in the left seat.