| Event type: | Meeting |
| Date: | 23rd June 2026 |
| Time: | 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm |
Sally Smith is a journalist and writer who has worked for various publications and media including as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail, for BBC News in England and ABC News in Australia. She was named Business Writer of the Year, has a Churchill Fellowship, is an established author with books published by Pelham Books, Rigby Books and The History Press and is a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. She has had a distinguished career in various aviation sports, representing both Great Britain and Australia in skydiving and ballooning and being awarded the Royal Aeronautical Society’s 2024 Women in Aviation, Aerospace and Space award. Along with aviation and sky sports, Sally has devoted much of her life to travel. She has lived on four continents, visited 72 countries and worked in major cities around the world from Cairo to Singapore and Tokyo to Perth, Western Australia. She now continues to write from her home base in Somerset, UK.
The talk covers the lives of the British women who achieved real firsts in aviation, from the very first British woman to go up in a balloon in 1785 to the first woman who gained her pilots’ license (her husband flatly refused to allow her to take flying lessons, so she did it under a different name!) and from the first woman to make a parachute descent (brought up in a Victorian workhouse, she went on to parachute from 3,000 feet over Cheltenham in 1889, an amazing story) right up to the fabulous women of the ATA in the second world war, to Diana Barnato who was the first British woman to go through the sound barrier and finally Helen Sharman, the first British woman in space. She is the only woman in the book still alive and it was fascinating to talk to her about the experience of circling the earth so high up.
Each woman has the most wonderful story, not one of them came from aviation backgrounds, and my talk is really about their personal stories, how or why they got involved in what in those days was a new and very male orientated field. Some of the stories are funny, some are breathtaking… but it is all a fascinating look at different eras and a snapshot into the different lives of women in more restricted times. My talk is entertaining rather than technical, although of course some aviation details are covered
Talk Booked for 23rd June – Magnificent Women and Flying Machines, the first 200 years of British Women in the Sky.