11/18/2025
CUANDO TE QUIERAS RENDIR...
Mira todo el recorrido para llegar hasta aquí.
London, 1968. Fifteen-year-old Barbara Harmer walked out of school for the last time with no qualifications, no university plans, and no clear path forward.She got a job cutting hair in a salon. It was respectable work. Steady income. A career many people would have been grateful for.But every time a plane flew overhead, Barbara looked up.She couldn't have articulated it then—the pull toward the sky, the feeling that she was meant to be up there, not down here trimming bangs and doing perms. She just knew that cutting hair, however skilled she became at it, wasn't going to be enough.At 20, she took her first step toward aviation: she applied to become a trainee air traffic controller at London Gatwick Airport. Not flying yet, but at least working around aircraft, being part of the world that fascinated her.She got the job. And while working at Gatwick, watching planes take off and land every day, the desire to be in the cockpit became impossible to ignore.But here's the problem: Barbara had left school at 15. She had no A-levels, no university degree, none of the qualifications the aviation industry expected. If she wanted to become a pilot, she'd have to build that foundation herself.So she did. While working full-time as an air traffic controller, she studied for A-levels in Geography, English Law, and Constitutional Law. She initially thought she might study law—a respectable profession, good career prospects.But the more time she spent at Gatwick, watching pilots, listening to them talk about flying, the more she knew: she didn't want to argue cases in courtrooms. She wanted to fly.The path forward was clear—and terrifying. Flight training was expensive. Commercial pilot training was even more expensive. Barbara didn't come from wealth. She had no family connections in aviation. She had no sponsor.She had a bank willing to loan her £10,000—an enormous sum in the early 1980s, equivalent to roughly £40,000-50,000 today.She took the loan. She bet everything on herself.Barbara enrolled in flight school and earned her private pilot's license. Then she tackled the commercial license through a grueling two-year distance learning program while still working. In 1982, she qualified as a commercial pilot.Now came the hard part: actually getting hired.She started sending out applications. Airlines. Charter companies. Cargo operators. Anyone who might give a pilot with no experience—and who happened to be a woman in a male-dominated field—a chance.Rejection after rejection after rejection.She kept counting. Ten rejections. Twenty. Fifty.She kept applying.Seventy-five rejections. Ninety. One hundred.One hundred airlines and aviation companies looked at Barbara Harmer's application and said no.She didn't quit. She kept flying. She kept applying. She refinanced. She borrowed more. She worked other jobs to stay afloat while waiting for that one airline to say yes.In 1984—two years after getting her commercial license, after 100 rejections—a small commuter airline finally hired her.It wasn't glamorous. Small aircraft, short routes, modest pay. But she was flying professionally. She was a pilot.Then, that same year, something bigger happened: British Caledonian Airlines offered her a position. A real airline. Jet aircraft. Scheduled routes.Barbara Harmer was 31 years old. She'd spent 16 years working toward this—from hairdresser to air traffic controller to student to rejected applicant to finally, finally, airline pilot.But she was just getting started.In 1987, British Caledonian merged with British Airways. Barbara found herself flying for one of the world's major carriers, operating DC-10 widebody aircraft across international routes.She flew the DC-10 for four years. She was good at it. Respected. Professional. But there was one aircraft she'd always dreamed of flying—the most famous, the fastest, the most exclusive aircraft in commercial aviation.Concorde.The supersonic passenger jet that cruised at Mach 2—twice the speed of sound. The aircraft that could cross the Atlantic in under 3.5 hours. The plane that represented the absolute pinnacle of commercial aviation.Only a handful of pilots ever flew Concorde. The selection process was notoriously difficult. Competition was fierce. And it was an entirely male club.In 1993, British Airways selected Barbara Harmer for Concorde training.She became the first woman in history to pilot Concorde.Think about that. The girl who'd left school at 15 to cut hair was now flying an aircraft that traveled faster than a rifle bullet, cruising at 60,000 feet—so high that passengers could see the curvature of the Earth.She flew Concorde for a decade, commanding supersonic flights between London and New York. Her passengers—celebrities, business leaders, royalty—had no idea that the calm voice announcing their arrival was coming from someone who'd been told "no" 100 times.Every flight was extraordinary. Taking off from Heathrow, accelerating through the sound barrier over the ocean, watching the Mach meter climb to 2.0 and beyond. The cockpit windows would get hot from air friction. The aircraft would stretch 6-10 inches from thermal expansion at cruising speed.It was as close to space travel as commercial aviation could get. And Barbara Harmer was one of the vanishingly few humans who got to experience it from the cockpit.When Concorde was retired in 2003—a victim of economics rather than capability—Barbara transitioned to flying Boeing 777s, continuing to command long-haul international flights. She flew until 2009, when she retired from commercial aviation after 25 years as an airline pilot.But retirement for Barbara didn't mean stopping. It meant changing direction.She'd conquered the skies. Now she wanted to conquer the sea. She took up sailing—seriously, the way she'd approached everything else in her life—and prepared to sail across the Atlantic in her own yacht.Same determination. Same refusal to accept limits. Just a different element.Today, Barbara Harmer's story stands as proof that your starting point doesn't determine your destination.She began in a hair salon with no qualifications and ended in the Concorde cockpit traveling at Mach 2.She was rejected 100 times and kept applying until someone said yes.She borrowed £10,000 she couldn't afford to lose and bet it all on herself.She entered an industry that didn't want women and became the first female pilot of its most iconic aircraft.Every barrier she faced—lack of education, lack of money, lack of connections, lack of encouragement, 100 rejections, gender discrimination—could have stopped her. Any one of those would have been enough reason to quit.She didn't quit. She just kept moving forward, one rejection at a time, one flight hour at a time, one barrier at a time.When reporters asked her about her achievement, she didn't talk about breaking barriers or making history. She talked about loving flying, about the privilege of piloting Concorde, about the satisfaction of doing something she was told was impossible."Success isn't about where you start," she's said. "It's about how far you're willing to go."Barbara Harmer started cutting hair at 15. By her 40s, she was breaking the sound barrier in Concorde.That's not luck. That's not privilege. That's pure, relentless determination—the willingness to face 100 rejections and send out application 101.The next time you face rejection, remember: somewhere, a hairdresser with no qualifications took out a massive loan, got rejected 100 times, and became the first woman to pilot Concorde.She didn't start with advantages. She created them through sheer refusal to accept "no" as final.The sky wasn't her limit. It was just her destination.
