Guest Blog Post: “My Mum, the Pilot,” in Hey Loons exact words

Once upon a time, a little girl was told that women shouldn’t fly airplanes …

I grew up knowing ‘mum flew planes’. This was one of a series of simple facts in my childhood: my sister and I were born in London; our parents came from India; dad sang; mum flew.

She told us stories about her teenage flying days ‘looping the loop’ above the clouds and performing steep dives towards the ground. She’d show us her album filled with old sepia photos of her standing proudly next to a small airplane.

The logbook pages had rows of handwritten entries of all her flights, each a flying adventure and she spoke about them with excitement and emotion, tinged with a hint of longing to be up amongst the clouds again.

Our mum, Dhira Chaliha, got her flying wings in 1961, at the age of 21, in India and to us as…