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284vate hire and as such the bus company should have been more careful. We actually had quite a row, but I won in the end. Years later he told me that he just gave them a serious bollocking in the end. I do not know if any of them realised what I had saved them from.Chapter 26In 1991, we started a new course as usual but this one was a bit different. It contained one of the first girls to train as a pilot. She was Caroline Williams and had been a RN Air Traffic Controller. She had transferred from the RN to be a pilot and came in as a Flight Lieutenant. She was the first girl our Squadron had but I cannot remember if she was the first one at Linton. Others had been trained at Cranwell. I remember going into ground school to lecture on survival and seeing this smiling face amongst the rest of her course. She had to be treated just the same as the boys and went through the LSE with no problem, although she did not enjoy it much. The Flight Commander, Bob Ellis, wanted to take her to first solo. I asked if I could have her after that as it would be a nice change from dealing with Foreign and Commonwealth students. In fact, I did her familiarisation ride and it looks as if I took her on an SCT trip a week or so later. It was unusual but not unknown to take students on SCT trips but if you did it was usually much later in the course when you knew them better. Caroline was nice to fly with as she was chatty, paid attention and smelt a lot better in the cockpit than most of the boys. I started flying regularly with her after she had gone solo for the first time. She really scared me during her circuit consolidation phase. Once students had done their first solo, which in the JP was just one circuit with no other aircraft about, they then did several more circuit details to build up experience. They would carry out a series of circuits but after 3 they had to leave the circuit, then re-join and do it all again. We used one of our relief landing fields for this, at that time Dishforth. One day Caroline was in