Mandy Hickson: What A Fighter Pilot Learned About Leadership Long Before She Ever Led

Mandy Hickson was thirty thousand feet above the middle of the Atlantic, in thick cloud, trying to guide a moving probe into a moving fuel basket at 420 miles an hour, when the radio went quiet. She and her crew were flying home from a huge American exercise called Red Flag, refuelling mid-air somewhere between the Azores and the UK, when word came through that America had shut its airspace. Nobody told them why. There was, she says, "this feeling of feeling completely out of control, because you're thinking, we have no concept what's happened. Why would a continent shut down?"

It was the eleventh of September, 2001, and Hickson had no idea what was unfolding on the ground. What she had, instead, was a mantra drilled into her through years of military training: control the controllables, and if you can't, let it go. So she and her crew went back to basics. They didn't know what was happening in America. They knew they were in thick cloud, in the middle of the ocean, with every aircraft around them being turned back and diverted. Their job was to fly the aeroplane. Aviate, navigate, communicate. Nothing else mattered until that was done.

That instinct, drilled in rather than discovered under pressure, is the thread that runs through everything Hickson has to say about leadership. She was one of the first women to fly fast jets for the RAF, at a time when women weren't permitted to do it at all. She flew combat missions defending the no-fly zone over southern Iraq. She has had a missile lock onto her aircraft and lived to talk about it, at a business conference, with the kind of composure that suggests the moment barely touched her. But the argument she makes, without ever quite stating it as one, is not really about bravery. It is about the mechanics of how an organisation builds people who can be trusted to perform when it matters, long before it needs them to.

The RAF had no choice but to get this right. As Hickson puts it: "We don't have the luxury of doing lateral hires. You have got to grow your leadership from bottom up." Most businesses do have that luxury. They can advertise a senior role and hire someone else's finished product. The military can't parachute in an experienced squadron leader from a rival air force. It has to take an eighteen-year-old cadet and turn them into someone capable of commanding a formation, which is precisely why it invests so heavily, so early, in leadership training that has nothing to do with rank.

Women Weren't Allowed To Fly, So She Trained For It Anyway

Hickson grew up in Manchester in the 1970s, hearing stories about her grandfather, who had flown during the Second World War. She joined the Air Cadets on the first night they let girls in, aged thirteen and three quarters, and flew for the first time not long after. She asked the instructor if he got paid to fly. He laughed and told her it was his job, his career, and then he said something that stuck: it was also his passion. Nobody in her life had ever linked a career to passion before. From that point she wanted one thing, to fly fast jets in the RAF.

The obstacles were not small. Roughly three thousand people applied for the kind of place she wanted, and only a fraction of those made it into a fast jet cockpit at all. On top of that, women weren't allowed to be pilots in the Air Force. "I'd actually chosen an impossible dream," she says. Rather than treat that as the end of the conversation, she chipped away at it: leadership positions at school, the Duke of Edinburgh award, promotion through the cadets, then Rangers. She applied for a flying scholarship and was told, by the standards of the day, that she was obese, because the height charts for women only went up to five foot eight and she was six foot tall with no equivalent entry. She lost the weight anyway, got the scholarship, learned to fly before she could drive, and racked up a hundred and sixty hours with the university air squadron. In her second year, the rules changed, and women were allowed to fly on the front line.

She is candid that this wasn't really about grit alone. It required people fighting her corner at every turn, and a mother who used to tell her, "If it's going to be someone, Mandy, why shouldn't it be you?" It's a small reframing with a large effect: not you can do this, which puts the pressure back on the individual, but you've done the preparation, so if the opportunity is going to land on somebody, there's no reason it shouldn't be you. She still uses it with her own children, one of whom is trying to build his own clothing brand in his early twenties, and she catches herself having to actively choose belief over doubt each time.

The Mission She Led Was The One She Was Least Qualified To Lead

The clearest illustration of the RAF's approach to leadership is the night Hickson led her first combat mission over Iraq. She was the most junior pilot in the formation. Her squadron boss was flying as her number two. Her senior executive officer was number three. The senior weapons instructor was number four. On paper, that looks like an organisation putting its least experienced person in charge of its most experienced people. In practice, it's what happens when an organisation has spent years deliberately pushing responsibility down before people feel ready for it, on the basis that the only way to find out whether someone can lead is to let them.

She had been flying operationally for four months and was due home the next day. Her mind, by her own admission, had started to relax. "We've nailed this," she remembers thinking. Then her navigator yelled, "Mandy, break right." A surface-to-air missile had locked onto her engine. She banked the aircraft to 120 degrees, pulled hard towards the ground, brought the power back, and her navigator released flares as a countermeasure at the exact right moment. The missile exploded around two miles away.

What happened next says more about the RAF's culture than the missile did. Once an aggressive act is made against any coalition aircraft, the rules allow that aircraft to prosecute an attack on a target, in this case a radar station. Hickson, still the most junior pilot in the formation, now had to lead a retasked mission with real weapons, against a live target, having just been shot at. She talks through the framework she reached for almost automatically: DODAR. Diagnose the problem. Ask the team for options. Make a decision. Assign the tasks. Review. It is not a complicated model. Its value is that it forces a structured pause into a moment that wants nothing more than panic.

The team decided to head south to find an airborne tanker, because refuelling would open up their options. They had exactly enough fuel to reach the target and get home, and not an ounce more.

The Bravest Decision She Made That Night Wasn't In The Cockpit

The tanker they found, in the middle of a sandstorm over Saudi Arabia at two in the morning, wasn't the British one they trained on. It had broken, possibly, Hickson notes drily, "due to defence cuts." In its place was an American KC-135, with a refuelling system she had never used. She told her boss she wasn't qualified. He told her to have a go. She tried twice and failed both times.

Then she did something harder than flying the aircraft. She told her navigator, who outranked her in experience if not in that formation's hierarchy, "I'm stopping." He told her to press on. She refused, reasoning that if she kept trying, she would be denying the rest of the team the chance to succeed where she couldn't. She stepped back and let her boss and her exec refuel instead. They did, successfully, and completed the mission. Hickson landed back at base with her number four, feeling, in her words, like a real failure.

Her navigator met her on the ground and told her it was a brilliant call. Then he explained why he'd pushed her to continue. He had spent three years on the unit that developed the exact weapon they were carrying that night, a weapon that had never been dropped in anger anywhere in the world, and some part of him had wanted to be the one to drop it. "I was a bit emotionally involved, if I'm honest," he admitted. "But fortunately, you were thinking rationally."

This is Hickson's real definition of psychological safety, offered without ever using the phrase as a slogan: an environment where a junior person can say I'm stopping to someone more senior, and where a senior person can later admit, unprompted, that his own judgement had been compromised by something as human as wanting a piece of history for himself. She believes the RAF built that culture long before psychological safety became a term anyone used in a boardroom, not through policy, but through practice: junior pilots were expected to challenge, to speak up, and to be heard.

She extends the same honesty to how organisations fail at this. She points to middle managers as the most common blockage, not through incompetence but through incentive: the pressure to report upward what senior leaders want to hear, rather than what she calls the WAH, the what's actually happening. Whatever a business believes is true about itself, the accurate version is often stuck several layers below the people making decisions from it.

The Cadet Who Hid Her Own Talent Out Of Fear Of Failing

Fifteen years ago, having left the regular RAF, Hickson stayed involved as a volunteer reservist, flying cadets. One of them was a teenage girl called Emily, her last flight of the day: sullen, monosyllabic, heavy eye makeup, giving every impression of a girl who didn't want to be there. In the air, something changed. Hickson taught her a standard medium turn, then a much harder sixty-degree turn, expecting to have to talk her through the mechanics. Emily cut her off. "Don't tell me. I read about that somewhere in a book." She then executed it perfectly on her first attempt, adding power and pulling back on the stick exactly as required to stop the nose slicing through the horizon.

She did the same with a loop-the-loop, pulling four G through the manoeuvre with total precision. Hickson, after twenty-eight years of flying, told her she had never flown with anyone with as much raw natural talent. Emily's reply: "I bet you say that to everyone." Hickson hadn't. When she asked if Emily had ever thought about becoming a pilot, the answer explained everything about the previous half hour. "This is all I've ever really wanted to do, and I was so scared I was gonna fail, I decided not to show you I was interested. I just didn't wanna even try."

Hickson calls this the dot dot dot: the unfinished sentence, I could have done it if..., that so many people carry around instead of an attempt. Her point isn't that failure doesn't matter. It's that avoiding the attempt to avoid the failure is its own, quieter kind of loss, one that never shows up as a story anyone tells about themselves. A year later, Emily found Hickson again to say she'd passed her exams and now wanted to be a pilot too, just like her. Those few words changed Hickson's own direction. She had just spent around twenty thousand pounds and eighteen months qualifying for a commercial pilot's licence, on the well-worn assumption that every RAF pilot eventually goes on to fly for an airline. Instead, she realised she wanted something else, and set up her own business as a speaker.

She applies the same idea to herself. She had always told herself she couldn't write, on the grounds that she'd been a science and maths pupil at school and English wasn't her strength. Everyone kept asking if she'd write a book, and she kept saying no, until she started saying not yet instead. It sounds like a small substitution. She describes it as one that stopped her brain treating the question as closed, and started it quietly working on how. She has since written two books, An Officer, Not a Gentleman and Officer and Her Gentleman, and speaks to more than a hundred thousand schoolchildren a year.

None of this reads, in Hickson's telling, as a story about exceptional individual courage. It reads as the result of a system that couldn't afford to wait for people to feel ready before giving them responsibility, that built the habit of speaking up before it needed anyone to use it under fire, and that trained decision-making as a discipline rather than hoping composure would simply turn up when required. Most businesses can still choose to hire that discipline in from outside, fully formed, in someone else's finished product. Hickson's career is a reminder of what gets built instead, in the people already there, once that option is taken away.

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