Introduction

There is no maternity pay in commercial aviation. Not officially, not structurally. When Captain Sarah Brodie went part-time and later took time off to have her children, she went from a corporate salary to what she calls "a token statutory amount" that would not even cover her mortgage. Nobody had built maternity provision into the industry's pay structures, not out of malice, but because the people negotiating long-term sick pay and other packages were, almost without exception, men who had never had to think about it.

That gap is the kind of thing that either gets accepted as the cost of doing business, or gets fought. Sarah chose to fight it, alongside a group of other pilot mothers, even though she had a mortgage to pay and children to look after, and even though speaking up made her the outlier in every room she flew into. Her story, told on Everyday Leadership, is about what it actually costs to be the person who says something is unfair when the system was never built with you in mind.

A Childhood in the Sky

Sarah says that at four years old she announced she was going to be a pilot. It came from her father, who had a real wanderlust and, in her words, "used to really engage with everyone he met." Long family trips to visit relatives in Australia meant sitting in the flight deck to watch a jumbo jet land on a short runway in Perth, and hanging out with cabin crew at the old Hong Kong airport. She absorbed her father's way of moving through the world before she ever understood she was doing it.

Her mother and grandmother, meanwhile, gave her a different fascination: the weather. Growing up in Reading, home of the UK Met Office, Sarah grew up hearing about weather systems in the garden. That combination, her father's love of flight and her mother's world of forecasting, quietly set the direction her career would eventually take.

Finding the Runway: From BBC Runner to First Flight

Sarah's path into flying was not direct. She studied physics \[CHECK: transcript says "AST physics" — likely astrophysics or a similarly named degree, spelling unclear from audio\] with an eye on joining the RAF, but a summer job packing pens led her to a newspaper advert seeking a broadcast meteorologist, jointly recruited by the BBC and the Met Office. She applied, got through to a screen test, and simultaneously secured a sponsored place on a master's in climate modelling as backup.

While she waited, she rang the BBC's careers department daily until they offered her a junior research assistant role, essentially a runner's job. She took every opportunity going: sitting in on the weather studio, watching *Have I Got News for You* being recorded, learning from newsreaders in the same studio as Moira Stewart. The BBC also ran a flying club that supported under-24 staff, and gave her her first five hours of flying for free, in an aerobatic Slingsby Firefly, under the guidance of two instructors with backgrounds spanning the RAF, architecture and live broadcast engineering.

Choosing Commercial Flying Over the RAF

Sarah was on track to train as an RAF pilot when 9/11 happened. She was at BBC Television Centre when it happened, had close friends in New York, and immediately understood the industry would be affected. She accepted her place on the master's programme straight away, correctly predicting that her British Airways application would be pulled.

She was then posted to an RAF base for weather forecasting work, surrounded almost entirely by men, and an instructor invited her to train toward RAF flying. But her mother had once told her she was a peacemaker who wouldn't want to get involved in wars. Sarah considered search and rescue as a middle path, but ultimately chose commercial aviation instead, joining as the industry began picking up again around 2003.

Proving Herself in a Man's Industry

Sarah is candid that, in her early flying training, she did not initially experience what she'd now call institutional misogyny. That changed when she trained in Spain: a Spanish flight instructor who had not made it as a pilot himself, and was instead teaching, actively tried to block her progress and made her training "pretty intense" and difficult. She describes the wider industry as full of "really great people, really great men," while acknowledging there was a harder minority to get through.

It took three years into her career before she flew with another woman as captain. Until then, every pilot she flew alongside was a man, even though the cabin crew she worked with were usually mostly women. That imbalance shaped how she was treated for years, including hotel staff who, even now that she is a captain, sometimes assume she must be cabin crew and allocate her the wrong room.

The Fight for Maternity Pay

The absence of maternity pay in aviation was not a deliberate decision, Sarah explains, it was an absence of thought. The industry's structures, inherited heavily from RAF conventions, were negotiated by men who simply never had to consider what happened to a pilot's income when she had a baby and couldn't fly. Very few women in the industry moved into management or captaincy roles, because, as Sarah puts it, they were already managing enough.

Sarah joined a campaign led by other pilot mothers who banded together to push for change. She contributed for a period before stepping back, and the campaign achieved real, if imperfect, improvements. But the personal cost during her own maternity leave was severe: a professional salary and years of invested training replaced by a token statutory payment that didn't come close to covering her mortgage.

What Flying Costs a Family

Beyond pay, Sarah is honest about the toll a flying career takes on family life. Rosters can arrive with only two to four weeks' notice, patterns swing from earliest to latest shifts within the same week, and she has missed school plays, sports matches, funerals and weddings. She recalls her daughter crying because Sarah had missed an entire season of cricket matches, neither of them having realised it added up until the season ended.

During COVID, her children got used to having her at home, which made the return to rostered flying harder for the whole family. Sarah has had direct conversations with her daughter about what flying provides, framing it as something she wants her daughter to understand: that a woman can have a career, go away for work, and still come home to a family that is okay. She has also decided to stick mainly to short-haul trips while her children are still at school, saving a long-haul "swan song" for after they leave for university.

Detained in Iran

One story stands out. As a first officer in her mid-twenties, pre-children, Sarah was doing a routine pre-flight walk-around in Iran when she was stopped and escorted away by a guard, apparently because she was "a female in a male area." She was left waiting, with no explanation, until a local ground colleague came to collect her, telling her not to say a word. She flew the aircraft home as planned. The airline later introduced a procedure requiring an escort for future stops.

At the time, Sarah says it didn't especially bother her. It was only later, after becoming a mother, that she found herself waking in the night thinking about how differently that moment could have gone.

From Cockpit to Boardroom, and an Obsession With Net Zero

A year before this conversation, Sarah moved into a management role, a shift she describes as jarring. Flying is procedural, factual and methodical: everyone on the flight deck wants the same outcome, a safe landing with happy passengers, so decisions don't need to be overthought. Management is messier. It involves scheduling across a network of tens of thousands of people who bring their full humanity, including sick days and human error, into a system that isn't as clean as a checklist.

Sarah says she now feels a strong pull to advocate for pilots and cabin crew from inside management, translating operational reality for people who haven't lived it, even when that makes her unpopular. Alongside this, she describes an ongoing personal obsession with reaching net zero in aviation, particularly sustainable aviation fuel. She points out that aviation currently accounts for a relatively small share of global emissions, but argues that share will grow in relative terms as other sectors decarbonise faster, making the industry's transition urgent rather than optional. In her own operation, she says there is "not a drop wasted," and that today's aircraft are dramatically more fuel-efficient than the ones she started flying twenty years ago.

What Leadership Means at 35,000 Feet

Asked to define leadership, Sarah calls it being the person people look to, the one who sets the tone, takes full responsibility, and is there so the team can get the job done. It is a simple definition from someone whose career has repeatedly required her to take responsibility in rooms, cockpits and campaigns where she was often the only woman present.