All my life I have wanted to fly and most of my life has been structured round realising my dream.
We didn’t have a huge amount of money when I was growing up and I couldn’t afford flying lessons, but I found ways to overcome that. My grandmother bought me a flying session for my 14th birthday and straight after that I wrote to aviation organisations to find out about scholarships. I also began offering private tutoring in maths and music, which earned me £15 an hour and enabled me to pay for flying lessons.
Later, when I was old enough, I won a scholarship to fund getting my private pilot’s licence. Keeping the licence once qualified proved hard because powered flights cost about £200 an hour so I kept these to a minimum at university and joined a gliding club to keep flying.
I took holiday jobs with the civil service to help pay for sessions and became a tug pilot, towing gliders into the air, to build experience. By the time I’d reached 100 hours I’d paid half through the scholarship and half through self-funding which meant living pretty frugally.
A friend took me for an aerobatics flight and I was hooked. Aerobatics is a bit like skating or diving – you perform precision manoeuvres like loops and rolls in a 1km cube of sky. I later applied for the British Aerobatics Foundation scholarship, which subsidised flying for a couple of years, by which time I could afford to hire a plane.
I met my husband at a gliding club, and we now spend every weekend between March and October and all our annual leave training for competitions and travelling the world as part of the British Aerobatics team.
I’ve worked full time for the civil service since 2007, and am now on the £50,000 to £75,000 payscale. My salary pays our living costs, while my husband’s income as a business jet pilot buys the “toys”. In our case, those are planes.
The first aerobatic plane I bought was in 2011 and I paid £12,000 for a third share. I’d bought a tiny two-bedroom ex-council flat the previous year for £189,000 and rented out the second bedroom. I’d saved the income from that to put towards the plane. I then sold my share to buy a quarter share in a better one.
It’s a bit like the housing ladder – you start at the cheaper end and work your way up. We are now on our third, which we share with another pilot and which is worth about the same as a one bedroom flat in Milton Keynes.
About 7% of my income goes on hangar fees, insurance and maintenance, then each training flight costs about as much as a dinner for two. We’ve recently taken up air display flying and perform at weddings and private functions, which contributes to the running costs, and I’ve qualified as an instructor. Corporate sponsorship helps us with some of the costs involved in international competing.
In ordinary life we scrimp and save. We sold my flat in 2015 after getting married and used the proceeds from that and an inheritance from my grandmother to buy a three-bedroom house for £489,000. The mortgage is £1,300 a month plus £230 a month in council tax. I run an elderly Ford Focus and I seldom buy new clothes. I find fashion has a habit of coming round again if you wait long enough.
We don’t drink much because you can’t if you’re flying the next day and we try not to eat out. My cooking has improved, which saves spending on ready meals. My phone is an old iPhone which I’ll keep till it stops working and I pay £20 a month for the contract. Utilities cost £65 a month.
We don’t have children because flying takes up so much of our lives, although we haven’t decided against starting a family. My philosophy is that you should work out what you want to do with your time and ambition, then find ways of making it work. Cost should not be a barrier.
As told to Anna Tims
