An elite flight school which will turn wounded veterans into commercial airline pilots will soon get off the ground in the north-east.
Wings for Warriors has unveiled plans for the facility at Aberdeen Airport – a world-first – to help transform the lives of ex-servicemen and women who have been injured while serving on the front lines.
The charity hopes the facility, which will be built next to Dyce Fire Station – will attract former forces personnel from across the UK.
Initially the plans for the school was to train helicopter pilots but, with the downturn of the oil and gas industry, the organisation was forced to go back to the drawing board and will now train up veterans to be commercial airline pilots.
The idea behind the school is to help people recover from their injuries, both physical and psychological, in a challenging environment which will ultimately lead to a respected and prosperous career.
Helicopter pilot Mark Radcliffe, who founded the charity in 2011, said the school would offer veterans a long-term resolution to the trauma of war.
He said: “What we are doing is raising the bar for what we give back to these people as a nation.
“The government spent a lot of money breaking these people and we are now doing our best to fix them.
“Our veterans’ recoveries took a bit of a kicking when the downturn happened and they could see their jobs slipping away, but we’ve now moved into a different market.
“Most of them have come from an environment where you have to overcome challenges to succeed, this is not a sugar-coated placebo.”
The charity’s chief fundraiser Charlie Marshall, himself a veteran, added: “We’re not getting any short cuts here, they’ll be treated like any other pilot and rightly so.
“What we’re doing is taking someone who has come from a hospital bed to being a commercial pilot on a mega salary just a few years later.”
So far the organisation has helped 15 veterans become either chopper or plane pilots.
Among them is Nathan Forster, a paratrooper who was blown up by an IED while serving in Afghanistan in 2013.
He nearly had to have his left leg amputated and spent three years confined to a wheelchair. But after getting in touch with the charity in 2016, he was put through a course at a flying school in Exeter and he has now secured a job with holiday airline Tui, formerly Thomson’s, which has officially backed the charity.
The long-term idea behind the school is to train up the veterans and employ some of them as instructors which will allow the charity make money by providing training to civilians.
The facility will be made up of five cabins, some of which are likely to be donated from the recent Queensferry Crossing construction project, and will have a door that leads onto the airport runway.
The next step for the charity is to raise enough money to run the school, and it will soon be launching a crowdfunding campaign.
Mr Radcliffe said: “We’ve had a lot of support from Aberdeen Airport, which has waived the take off and landing fees for our pilots in the past.
“We had considered moving away from the north-east, but we’ve had a lot of backing up here and it’s Aberdonians that are going to push over the finishing line.”
The crowdfunder has still to be officially launched but the charity is appealing for any donations, big or small, to text WNGS43 followed by the amount, without the pound sign, to 70070.
