Henrietta Davies

My name is Henrietta. I'm based in the UK in Norfolk and I am a helicopter pilot.

So my role is working as a captain on an air ambulance. So most of my day or the start of my day for sure is spent preparing for the rest of the day.

So we work shift work and arrive for 12 hours. So the first things I do is being prepared in checking the weather, checking the aircraft, running all the checks and then briefing the crew so that we're ready to go.

The phone can ring at any time. It moves from a pace of getting jobs done to a sort of highly focused role once that red phone rings.

Yeah, so there's definitely no such thing as a typical day. Every single day is different.

It couldn't possibly be the same. Some days are really busy. Some days are quite quiet. Some days the weather's terrible and it's harder than other days. Each day presents its own challenges. Everything changes quite quickly and we have to stay very flexible.

We might get a tasking by day, launch out for that, that's about a two to three minute lift time from the office and after we've completed that tasking we might be retasked to a job.

It might now have become night for example so we might now be on to night vision goggles and spending our time planning and getting to the next patient who needs help and getting them to the care that they need wherever that be within our region.

Yeah, so teamwork's really important for us. I work very closely with another pilot. We are a multi-crew operation out of Norwich. So there's always two pilots and then in the back we have at least one doctor and a paramedic.

And that will be the duty crew for the day. So that's really important and a huge amount of trust and communication is required to work in that close little unit. But we also require a lot of other people.

We require engineers, we require an ops team, we require the charity behind us. We require air traffic control and all the other people involved in our day to get us where we need to be doing what we need to do and doing it all safely.

The best thing about my job is knowing that we make a difference. We very much see people on the worst days of their lives and being able to play a small part in the team that gets them to the help that they need and the care that they need is a really meaningful job for me.

So the hardest part of my job is probably with the amount of change that happens during the day, there's a lot of responsibility in the decisions that are made and it's ever changing.

Everything that you think you've just thought up a plan and then something else happens which changes your plan constantly. So remaining very flexible and being open to just changing your mind or changing what we're doing the whole time is probably the hardest part.

I was inspired into becoming a pilot by my godmother who is an aviator and she really helped me and encouraged me with that sort of curiosity I had from quite an early age from about eight or nine.

It took a lot of training, a lot of persistence and a lot of support from my family and friends to get me into the career that I'm now in.

So my school education helped me a lot.

The thing about flying is that we are constantly lifelong learners really. There is always more to learn, so it just doesn't stop. Even now, you will still find me training, studying, checking, all of those things constantly.

I still sit multiple exams per year. That is part of the rules of us being pilots. So that never stopped. So my education was really important in teaching me how to learn and being able to be an independent learner because no one sits with me and tells me anymore I just have to do it myself.

Going forward, so once I left school I went to America to do my licenses there. There's lots of different routes to get into flying. It's a funny thing to get into. It's not quite as simple as some other roles where there might be a defined career path.

Flying, there's a lot of different ways that you can get into it and it's not as clear cut. So I chose to do a course that was in Florida, so I spent a year there and I got both my American and my UK license.

And then once I came back from America, I did a little bit of further training which led me to a job offshore out of Aberdeen initially.

Yes, so flying is quite antisocial as a job.

It's brilliant and I would recommend it to anyone. However, it does not pay attention to weekends, nights, days, hours, holidays, family events, Christmas. They all count as the same. Rotas and rosters are not particularly friendly.

So there is a big challenge there. Like lots of shift work, there are plenty of roles that involve shift work. It is just a little bit antisocial. There are also a huge amount of roles you can do within flying.

There's all the firefighting, utility, there's power line inspections, there's the offshore world, there's a charter world flying people around to events, there's the air ambulance, there's all sorts of things.

But they generally have to be either near an airport or in a particular place within country. So it does limit you to where you need to be for your work. I have three small children and that means that it's a balancing act and it is a challenge.

And some days are hard because I can't be in two places at once. However, my kids have seen that it is possible. I can do both and it is possible to do both things.

It probably doesn't look like the standard nine to five role. We probably operate a little bit differently in our house to accommodate both things, but I equally enjoy being at work and getting to be a professional and then coming home and being a mum.

I think there are many, a lot of them come with the current role that I do. There's a sort of overwhelming trust that people put in you to help them when we arrive at the kind of jobs and scenes that we go to.

So there's that side of it. There's also the side where I could say taking my mum flying when I first got my license and taking her up, that was a great day.

There's loads of advice I wish I'd had when I was younger. You don't need to be the same as everybody else. I don't really fit the profile for your standard helicopter pilot. There are just 36 female helicopter pilots in the UK out of about 1,400.

But go for it, it's perfectly possible. I'd also say pick one thing and concentrate all your effort on it. Put all your curiosity into something. Even if you aren't 100% sure, put your effort into one thing and get good at it.

Because the first few years in any job are always hard. Once you've got your feet under the table, then it gets a little bit easier and you can choose a bit more and you've got a bit of experience behind you.

You can change. You can change your mind and do a different career. In 10 years, I could change my mind now and do something different. That's fine. But if you just give it a bit of time, you'll find that probably with all jobs, they get a bit easier with a bit of experience.