Ellie in the news

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Ouragan
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Joined: Fri 22 Jul 2016, 11:34 am

Ellie in the news

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Nice piece in The Times about our very own Ellie Carter this week. Well done, Ellie, and I hope you told that instructor where he could stick his thermals.

Fear of flying? Not for Ellie Carter, the 16-year-old ace

Ellie Carter is Britain’s youngest female pilot. Harry Wallop, who is nervous parking at Waitrose, gets in a simulator with her

I have a 16-year-old son who completed his GCSEs this summer. To celebrate finishing he went off to Alton Towers with a friend and rode Nemesis.

Ellie Carter is also 16. To celebrate finishing her GCSEs she got into a Cessna 152 single-engine plane and flew it solo from her home aerodrome of Dunkeswell in Devon the 52 miles to Compton Abbas in Dorset. After that she flew home, put her revision notes on the barbecue and roasted some marshmallows on the flames. “They tasted very good,” she says.

At the end of last year Ellie became Britain’s youngest solo pilot of a powered aircraft, taking control of a Cessna three days after her 16th birthday. She wanted to do it on her birthday, but Storm Diana got in the way. “I love every aspect of flying,” she says. “Birds flying with you, rainbows become circles — everything becomes different. Imagine having your first car and times it by a thousand.”

You’re too young to even drive a car, I point out. “Legally,” she says, smiling. She has driven on private land at the gliding field she flies from. I ask how good she is. “Umm,” she says, trying to work out what the modest answer is. “She’s very good,” chips in her father, Neil. “It’s a huge, flat field so I let her go off in my car.”

You’re quite relaxed about this? “When you’ve seen her hop off in a plane to Gloucestershire, watching her drive a Ford Mondeo isn’t a big worry.” Fair point.

And, presuming another storm doesn’t get in the way, she will receive her private pilot’s licence on her 17th birthday, becoming Britain’s youngest qualified pilot. She is also likely to be the youngest female pilot by some margin. In 2016, the most recent year for which the Civil Aviation Authority has figures, there were 163 teenagers who held a private pilot’s licence, and just ten were girls.

Ellie is unfazed by being such a trailblazer, struggling to find an example of when she has been nervous when in the air. “I don’t think I’ve ever had anything scary happen to me,” she says quite shyly. Really? I get anxious trying to reverse out of a space in the Waitrose car park.

“I mean, I’ve been pretty lucky, I guess. The other day I got cut up by a microlight on the way to Compton Abbas on the final approach,” she says matter-of-factly. “So I just did a go-around.” That’s when you have to abort the landing and climb back up before attempting another descent.

She has done loop-the-loops and barrel rolls in a Chipmunk — “pretty cool” is her measured opinion — and thinks the ultimate job is a toss-up between astronaut and stunt pilot: “Barnstorming and landing on cars and stuff.”

In fact, she has almost run out of tasks to complete before she can take her final flying test on her 17th birthday. To get your licence, you have to have done 45 “loggable” hours of flying — that’s with an instructor monitoring you, even if they are on the ground while you are on your own in the air, and she has done 40 already. “I’m actually on a go-slow at the moment,” she says.

“The only reason is the expense,” Neil explains. It is a pricey hobby. Every hour that Ellie rents out the Cessna, it costs £170.

That she is stalling her flying explains why she and her father are meeting me at L3 Harris, an airline training academy in Southampton. It trains pilots for Virgin, British Airways, SAS and Easyjet using £10 million simulators, which are replicas of an Airbus or Boeing cockpit. Ellie’s achievements have caught the eye of Easyjet, a company that has vowed that within the next two years 20 per cent of the new pilots it recruits will be female, to redress gender imbalance across its cockpit crew. At present 6 per cent of its pilots are female, only a fraction above the industry average of 5 per cent.

It is also a company with a sharp eye for a bit of PR, so it has offered one of its most senior pilots, Zoe Ebrey, 44, as a mentor to Ellie. Easyjet isn’t putting its hand into its pocket for this scheme. This is a company that charges £2 for an on-board KitKat, let’s not forget, but Ebrey is giving quite a bit of her time. “We want to highlight aviation as a potential career option,” she explains. She is particularly keen that girls see piloting as a viable career option, as boys do — a tricky task considering the comments she sometimes gets from passengers. “It’s mostly something really stupid like, ‘I hope you’ve got a bloke to reverse that for you.’ It’s water off a duck’s back most of the time.”

She adds: “We can’t change people’s opinions, but we can just say, ‘Here it is. It’s quite a normal activity for a girl to do.’ ”

Ellie has had to counter prejudice as well because of her age and gender. One teacher thought she was lying when she handed in a “What I did at the weekend” homework essay that detailed her flying. She was made to write it again.

Even some of the men at her air club struggle with the idea of someone so young flying solo. “It’s kind of funny because I look like I’m 12 and I walk out there and get in a plane and everyone’s, like, ‘She’s not gonna fly the thing, is she?’ and I go off, and their faces are just brilliant.” She shrugs.

Later, though, Neil takes me aside. “Ellie will pretend they were not there, but there were negative comments,” he says. “I can remember Ellie being at a gliding school, and they had an aerobatics pilot who came in. Now Ellie is really gifted at science and this instructor spoke to the boy and explained all about the physics of how the glider worked and then he turned to Ellie and said, ‘I won’t explain it to you because you won’t understand.’ He’s never met her before. I can only presume it was because she was a girl. It goes over her head, but as her dad it really upsets me. You get really protective.”

More than anything it was Ellie’s love of science that got her into flying. “I always found maths quite easy. I got my parents to buy me GCSE maths books when I was at junior school and I found trigonometry amazing and its relation to flight,” she says. Part of her flying costs have been funded by her tutoring maths to some local children to get them up to speed with their schoolwork. For her A levels she’s going to Exeter Maths School to study maths, further maths, physics and computer science.

Neil says she has been fascinated by flying since before she could walk. “When we used to take Ellie out, when she was in a pushchair, she used to look up at the sky and stare at the aeroplanes and vapour trails. And then when she got to about three or four she started playing with toys, but the dolls were ditched. Instead it was Lego, Meccano and different flying machines were built. The dolls eventually became crash test dummies.”

She would pester Neil and her mother, Lorna, to take her to air shows and would seek out pilots to chat to. “A navy pilot started to teach me drift at an air show and I realised maths solved everything,” Ellie says.

She became obsessed by the U-2, the US spy plane that can fly up to 70,000ft, on the edge of the stratosphere. “When I was nine, I decided to write a letter to some U-2 pilots to ask them to bring their U-2 to a local air show.” She failed to put her address on the letter, but they were so intrigued they tracked her down and invited her to see the plane, nicknamed Dragon Lady, when it was next in the UK, at an RAF airbase. “It’s pretty wicked. All aircraft are wicked, but this was so cool.” Her nickname is now Dragon Girl.

Neil says: “The annoying thing was they said, ‘Oh, can you be here for four o’clock in the morning? Because it’s all top secret we’d like to do it in the dark.’ So we got there at four o’clock in the morning only to discover it was three hours late flying in from the United States.”

He might be grumbling, but I can tell he doesn’t resent one bit the hours he has to drive to distant airfields to support Ellie. The day after the interview, Ellie messages me to tell me something she felt she couldn’t say in front of him. “My dad has been a huge influence on me, not just because he has always been there supporting me, but also because he is just an amazing person.” He wrote her two novels “to inspire me, but also to teach me so much about acceptance while I was feeling excluded myself. It was just an awesome thing to do.”

She may have been teased in the past, but she has fans in high places, including Carol Vorderman, the television presenter who has a pilot’s licence. “She’s so lovely and so supportive,” Ellie says. “She’s become a really good friend.”

More importantly, perhaps, she has impressed the professionals. After our chat, Ellie gets into the Airbus A320 simulator in the pilot’s seat, with Ebrey in the co-pilot’s seat. I sit at the back of the cockpit. From the window, the sophisticated programme can display the view from any airport in the world. Disappointingly, we take off from Gatwick rather than Honolulu and do a short trip around the Sussex countryside, briefly venturing above the Channel.

Ebrey takes Ellie through the hugely different challenge of flying a computer-powered machine rather than a plane with a rudder. The 16-year-old seems to absorb all the instructions, nods and gets on with it. For our landing, Ellie is completely in charge. “Just a smidge to the left,” Ebrey tells her. “Lower the nose slightly.” Then we land, with no more than a gentle bump.

“It was a beautifully flown approach,” is Ebrey’s verdict. “That was just absolutely superb.”

Before I head off I wish Ellie luck for her GCSE results and ask her if she thinks she has done well. “OK, I think,” she says with a wavy hand gesture. I think she might have done better than that.

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