Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 13th of April.

If you are a loyal listener to the Independence Daily Travel podcast, well thank you.

And you'll also know that I've been covering the British Airways Speedbird Pilot Academy since its inception,

nearly three years ago. I'm delighted to be back at Heathrow with senior first officer

Genevieve Permain, who's the program league, and we'll find out what's in store because

there's big news happening tomorrow. But first, I want to hear from Jasmine Campbell, one of the cadets from the inaugural

Speedbird pilot Academy intake.

And now, Jasmine, flying Airbus A320 family aircraft across the UK and Europe for BA.

Yeah, it's been a really fabulous experience.

I was so fortunate to be on the first course of the Speedbird scheme.

Even that in itself was really exciting.

We didn't really know what to expect at the time being the first course.

So it's really rewarding now to be able to speak to people that are considering applying

or who have just started their journey.

Talk us through that

journey. I imagine just a vast amount of technical expertise that you have to master, but also

probably quite a lot of human skills as well. It's definitely a course that has some challenges,

but if like myself you've wanted to be a pilot for as long as you can

remember, then you go into that with your eyes open. You know that you're going to need to put in a

lot of work and a lot of commitment in order to be successful. There's undoubtedly a massive

amount of technical knowledge and academic study that goes into it. And that study doesn't

stop when you finish flight training,

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