Lieutenant Jo Brook was in love the second she left the deck on her first helicopter flight and soon she will be the first woman in the Royal New Zealand Navy to qualify as a helicopter pilot.

Brook didn’t set out to be a trail-blazer. She was thinking about her future in the Navy after nearly six years as a Warfare Officer, and was intrigued to learn helicopter pilot was a potential career option for her specialisation.

She was serving aboard HMNZS Canterbury in the South Pacific, near Vanuatu, at the time and a shipmate offered to take her on a helicopter flight.

“We flew around some of the islands... I thought it was just the coolest thing I’d ever done.”

Brook will be awarded her wings on Friday after completing an 18-month training course at RNZAF Base Ōhakea. She will soon begin training with No.3 Squadron with a A109 Light Utility Helicopter.

The anticipation felt a lot like when she joined the Navy as a 20-year-old, and she was looking forward to low-level flying exercises the most, she said.

“We can fly down to quite a low level in the [T-6C Texan airplanes], but in the helicopters we’ll be basically brushing the tree tops with the rotor blades.”

Brook said it felt weird to be getting attention for her gender – after the initial flurry of discussions about her application faded into the background during training.

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“For me, the bigger achievement is getting my wings, not being the Navy’s first female helicopter pilot... and I think the boys are with me on that.”

The achievement was particularly impressive for the set-backs she’d overcome.

Brook broke her wrist playing sports right after flying her first training sortie in December 2019, and was bedridden for four weeks with a nasty virus late last year.

The time lost in recovery meant she had to work hard to qualify.

“I had to do five-to-seven flights a week to catch up which was quite intense.”

The young officer was still too focused on her upcoming training programmes to think about her future, but had a few hopes for her next posting.

“I want to go out on one of the frigates or our new tanker, the Aotearoa, which goes down to Antarctica. But we’ll see how it goes.”