Former hairdresser Barbara Harmer yesterday became the first woman to pilot Concorde. A convent-educated Action Woman, she qualified on Sunday and is now the most senior woman on the British Airways flying staff. We talk over breakfast in a tin can 29,000 feet off the ground, her ‘natural environment’.

She flew Concorde (under supervision) for the first time last year. It’s known to be a slippery, demanding beast. ‘When you apply the power, you feel a nudge in your back and it goes off down the runway like a scalded cat. You can’t believe the acceleration.’

She wasn’t scared and doesn’t worry about emergency landings over New York, hijackers or wings dropping off. She’s pragmatic about the dozen or so occasions when she’s had passengers on board and found one missing but with his bag in the hold. And about the three times she’s had engine failure during her 11 years of licensed flying.

‘On one flight to Jersey, there was lots of noise, the aircraft rolled violently and all the passengers were screaming in the back,’ she says. ‘The engine had completely disintegrated and blown itself apart.’ She shut the engine down and came back into Gatwick where all the emergency services were waiting. ‘Your mind is so full of where you’re going to go and talking to ground control that you don’t have time to think about how you feel.’ She’s never had more than her pride hurt in a plane. Things were fine when she flew Eric Clapton, and dandy with Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, Lord David Owen and even Sarah Brightman. But Baroness Thatcher, ouch. ‘She was travelling under an assumed name in Concorde back from New York in February. My landing at Heathrow was my worst ever. I thought, ‘I hope they don’t tell her it’s a female at the controls. I’d hate her to think we can’t cope’.’ A carton of orange juice, Danish pastry and broken plastic cup dripping tea arrive.

Harmer has an open face, bright eyes and toothy smile. She wears a red drummer boy’s jacket, girly pleated skirt and the heady smell of Opium scent. She is positive, determined and has a dirty laugh. She claims she’s 40 years old – but is, in fact, only 39. ‘I’m practising getting used to the big four-o.’

She’s unmarried but has a design engineer boyfriend. He lives in Teddington and she lives near Bognor Regis. This is geographically close for Ms Biggles. ‘I used to commute to Anchorage in Alaska where I had a boyfriend. I took 22 flights in three years.’

She’s an extraordinary woman. She works out in the gym three times a week, skis (and has the tan to prove it), sails (racing in the Solent on a 32ft yacht), cycles in the summer (does the London to Brighton ride, 60 miles in three-and-a-quarter hours, and this year wants to do the 100-mile centenary ride) and plays tennis. At one time she played golf, but says it takes too long. She also drives a sports car. ‘I used to break the speed limit. But since flying, I’ve learned to slow down.’

Another amazing thing about her is that she left school aged 15 but has 11 O-levels and four A-levels. She was educated privately at a convent. (‘If the nuns had known I was going to be a pilot they’d have said, ‘Don’t be so ridiculous’. I suppose the discipline was helpful.’) And she was ‘a rebel’ at school. ‘I just didn’t work.’

When she took her A-levels, she was working as an air-traffic control assistant at Gatwick. ‘I just ordered the syllabuses from the examining boards, bought the recommended texts and looked at past papers. I did it all by myself, with no tuition.’ (After our meeting she’s addressing a Manchester school at a seminar on women at work.) Her father was a commercial artist, her mother a haberdasher and she was the youngest of four girls. Two of her sisters are now unexceptionally married with children, but the other is a missionary in the States for born-again Christians. Harmer was brought up in Essex and wanted to work with horses, but her parents said there was no money in four-legged creatures, so she went into hairdressing for six years.

She flew for the first time on Boxing Day in 1975, in a two-seater Cessna. ‘It was only the second time I’d ever been in a plane. I was 24 years old and I’d never even left England before.’ She found it exhilarating and frightening. ‘I liked driving. Flying is similar to driving or sailing, just a different mode of transport.’

She didn’t go on a course, but simply built up the requisite 700 flying hours while still beavering as that A-level-studying air-traffic-control assistant. ‘I’m what they call a self-improver. I paid for myself.’ It cost £15,000 to be a self-improver, and she borrowed £10,000 from the bank. In 1982 she passed her exams and started working as a pilot. Fast forward to 1992. It is, she says, the dream of every pilot to fly Concorde and speed through the air at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound. Her training took six months and cost £100,000. This time she wasn’t a self-improver, and Lord King picked up the tab. She now earns £37,000 and is ambitious to become a captain for £60,000.

British Airways has 2,682 pilots, of whom 40 are female. It only started recruiting women pilots in 1987. What’s it like being the first woman to fly Concorde? ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever been first at anything. It’s mind-blowing,’ she says, perkily. Of course she’s endured lots of unrepeatable jokes about, er, women drivers. But she says there’s no discrimination. ‘Just much more pressure on you to be equal to – or better than – the boys.’

So is she as robustly confident as she appears? ‘Of course not,’ she laughs. ‘But this is my environment. I’m used to spending my time in an aeroplane.’ This is, by the way, a Shuttle en route to Manchester. Bet you thought we were in Concorde, didn’t you?