“The police are working hard to give us our own space, such as our own bathrooms, but before we shared absolutely everything,” says 30-year-old pilot Francoise Valencia, laughing as she recalls how the women would often rise early to beat their male colleagues to the tiny bathroom.
But the real problem, at least in the early days, was the attitude towards their tiny group. Kelly remembers a few officers telling her “if it were up to them” women would be banned from flying helicopters on the frontline. Time, she insists, has proved the women right.
“We are not the weaker sex, we are really calm in tough situations and we have risked our lives in the field,” Erika adds, pulling up her sleeve to reveal her tiny scar – a permanent reminder of the bullet that passed through her helicopter’s undercarriage and sailed clean through her hand.
“My family are the proudest people in the world of my job,” said Kelly, a pilot with the National Police. Pilots face very real danger, however, whether male or female.
Erika is something of a heroine amongst the other women. Besides performing an expert emergency landing the day her aircraft was attacked (“Thank God there was another chopper close by to extract us,” she says) she is also happily married with a five-year-old daughter, Sara.
“Erika was flying the Black Hawks when she had her baby but she still did it,” Kelly says proudly. “Even after she was shot they asked her if she wanted to switch to flying the force aeroplanes but she refused.”
Still Erika admits juggling her work with her family life can be tough. Heartbreakingly, her daughter Sara soon learned to count the 15 days of her mum’s rotation and frequently asks Erika “how many fingers it will be” until she next comes home. “But as kids get older they start to understand why you are away so much,” she says. “My life has been made a lot easier because my mum helps us a lot with Sara. I feel I have been really blessed. There’s only a small amount of us but I feel we’ve opened the door for other women.”
All of the women hope their work will change the way female pilots are viewed, both in Colombia and across Latin America. Francoise – who has so far escaped injury despite her helicopter being hit several times – says she has noticed the attitudes change throughout her career.
“At first I think some of the men were a little scared to see women doing this job but now they trust us completely,” she says. “Time has made them see we are good pilots.” And like all the women, she says she loves her job – waking up every day ‘knowing she is going to help someone’. “That’s why there’s no difference between the men and women,” she grins. “We have a job to do and we need to get it done. It’s not like the boss will say: ‘Oh no, we can’t send in the girls,’ because it’ll be too late. We’ll already have gone.”
