Left red-faced on Red Arrows jaunt

HAVING read the Book of the Week review of The red Arrows, I can confirm female flyers have ‘a better stomach for it’. I know this because I was the second female to fly with the red Arrows, newsreader Jan Leeming being the first. In 1983, I took off from RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire with ‘Curly’, my red 7 pilot, on the flight of a lifetime in order to write an article for the women’s magazine Annabel. The only scary moment was when he said: ‘One thing that will not be a joke is when I order you to eject. You have to press that yourself because if you don’t, you’ll see me ejecting from the plane and you’ll be up there on your own.’ I didn’t have the nerve to tell him that if we were over the sea there was no way I’d be doing that as I had a bigger fear of drowning. Only a few weeks later Curly was on a practice flight abroad when he had a problem with his red Arrow Hawk and the ejector failed. He crashed and was seriously injured. He was unable to fly again. I was not told about his accident until after my article appeared.