pilot.Now came the hard part: actually getting hired.She started sending out applications. Airlines. Charter companies. Cargo operators. Anyone who might give a pilot with no experience—and who happened to be a woman in a male-dominated field—a chance.Rejection after rejection after rejection.She kept counting. Ten rejections. Twenty. Fifty.She kept applying.Seventy-five rejections. Ninety. One hundred.One hundred airlines and aviation companies looked at Barbara Harmer’s application and said no.She didn’t quit. She kept flying. She kept applying. She refinanced. She borrowed more. She worked other jobs to stay afloat while waiting for that one airline to say yes.In 1984—two years after getting her commercial license, after 100 rejections—a small commuter airline finally hired her.It wasn’t glamorous. Small aircraft, short routes, modest pay. But she was flying professionally. She was a pilot.Then, that same year, something bigger happened: British Caledonian Airlines offered her a position. A real airline. Jet aircraft. Scheduled routes.Barbara Harmer was 31 years old. She’d spent 16 years working toward this—from hairdresser to air traffic controller to student to rejected applicant to finally, finally, airline pilot.But she was just getting started.In 1987, British Caledonian merged with British Airways. Barbara found herself flying for one of the world’s major carriers, operating DC-10 widebody aircraft across international routes.She flew the DC-10 for four years. She was good at it. Respected. Professional. But there was one aircraft she’d always dreamed of flying—the most famous, the fastest, the most exclusive aircraft in commercial aviation.Concorde.The supersonic passenger jet that cruised at Mach 2—twice the speed of sound. The aircraft that could cross the Atlantic in under 3.5 hours. The plane that represented the absolute pinnacle of commercial aviation.Only a handful of pilots ever flew Concorde. The selection process was notoriously difficult. Competition was fierce. And it was an entirely male club.In 1993, British Airways selected Barbara Harmer for Concorde training.She became the first woman in history to pilot Concorde.Think about that. The girl who’d left school at 15 to cut hair was now flying an aircraft that traveled faster than a rifle bullet, cruising at 60,000 feet—so high that passengers could see the curvature of the Earth.She flew Concorde for a decade, commanding supersonic flights between London and New York. Her passengers—celebrities, business leaders, royalty—had no idea that the calm voice announcing their arrival was coming from someone who’d been told “no” 100 times.Every flight was extraordinary. Taking off from Heathrow, accelerating through the sound barrier over the ocean, watching the Mach meter climb to 2.0 and beyond. The cockpit windows would get hot from air friction. The aircraft would stretch 6-10 inches from thermal expansion at cruising speed.It was as close to space travel as commercial aviation could get. And Barbara Harmer was one of the vanishingly few humans who got to experience it from the cockpit.When Concorde was retired in 2003—a victim of economics rather than capability—Barbara transitioned to flying Boeing 777s, continuing to command long-haul international flights. She flew until 2009, when she retired from commercial aviation after 25 years as an airline pilot.But retirement for Barbara didn’t mean stopping. It meant changing
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