While her friends were learning to drive as teenagers, Shibani Kaur Gupta was busy learning to fly, earning her private pilot licence at just 17 years old.
Having grown up five minutes from an airport, she’d always loved planes — a passion that she shared with her father.
‘All I spoke about as a child was aircrafts, and airlines, different tail registrations, and liveries,’ she tells Metro.co.uk.
‘My dad always encouraged my sisters and I to meet pilots and go into flight decks whenever we could. It really inspired me.
‘I remember speaking to a female pilot when I was about seven or eight and it was really exciting to meet her, but becoming a pilot didn’t happen very organically for me — I was initially going to be a doctor.’
Shibani, now 35, recalls how she planned to pursue medicine, but after starting to study the subject, she quickly realised it wasn’t the right path for her.
So at 18, she decided to turn her love of planes into a career, and began working to obtain a commercial pilot licence so she could fly for a living.
’18 is the earliest legal age you can get your commercial licence,’ she explains. ‘You can get the private one earlier but that’s just for fun, it doesn’t allow you to have any revenue clients.’
By 19, she’d completed a year of training and exams, achieved the qualification, and landed her first proper pilot role, making her one of the youngest people on the job.
‘I moved to India to be closer to my family and started flying there,’ she says. ‘It was with a company called Jet Airways, based out of Mumbai and I worked there for 13 years.’
Shibani currently lives in London with her husband and has worked up the ranks to become a Line Training Captain for Wizz Air.
But despite having been a pilot for half of her life, not a day goes by that she doesn’t get mistaken for a flight attendant.
‘It’s something I’m so used to, it happens so often,’ she admits.
And it’s not only strangers that assume she’s cabin crew. When she was getting married, Shibani claims her husband’s side of the family didn’t believe she was a pilot.
‘My mother-in-law told people that I’m a pilot and they would say “No, you must be mistaken, surely she’s cabin crew”. And she’d have to say that she knows for sure that I’m a pilot.’
While some assume she’s a flight attendant, others have assumed she must not be very good at her job simply because she’s a woman. A male passenger once even refused to board a plane after discovering she would be the one flying it.
‘I assumed he was joking, but he had some real qualms about a female being the pilot and taking him to that particular destination, as it was quite a challenging journey,’ Shibani recalls.
‘He hadn’t really seen a female pilot before, as there aren’t that many of us. Only about 6-8% of pilots are female, and only about 3.8% are captains. There were even less when I first started flying in 2007.
‘The problem was all to do with his cognitive bias. People assume that [being a pilot] is a physical job and only men can do physical and laborious jobs, which is completely incorrect. This job isn’t physical, it’s more mental, there’s lots of decision making involved and there are emergencies to deal with, and I feel like women are particularly good at staying calm in those kinds of situations.’
Shibani proved this point when she successfully calmed the passenger down and convinced him to board the flight as planned.
‘I was very composed and I assured him that I was very experienced and I wouldn’t be there if I didn’t deserve to be,’ she says.
The flight went smoothly and he ended up apologising for his earlier comments, claiming it was ‘by far the best flight’ he’d ever taken to that particular destination.
‘After that experience, he probably wishes there were more females in flight decks,’ Shibani jokes.
Despite what you might assume, Shibani doesn’t get easily offended by comments about her gender. She’s aware that she works in a very male-dominated profession, and feels privileged to be one of the few female pilots in the industry.
‘Why should I be offended? It’s very important that people realise women can be pilots too,’ she says.
‘It can be difficult to break into a male dominated industry like this, and it does have its challenges, but at the same time it’s very rewarding.
‘Every time I’ve had someone make a comment about my gender, the flight has ended up being a game-changer for them, it’s helped to changed their perspective about women in aviation.
‘I feel very honoured and blessed to have an opportunity to break down gender stereotypes and really make a difference.’
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