Logo for Project Wingman featuring an airplane and a heartbeat line inside a circular swirl, with text and establishment year 2020

Captain to Wingman

How a former airline captain took a national NHS-support charity from zero to 6,500 volunteers in weeks, and what it taught her about leading under pressure.

WATCH REEL

March 2020
An empty airport

On the night I landed at Gatwick from Luxembourg, our passengers wished us good luck instead of goodbye.

We didn't know it yet, but that was the last commercial flight I'd operate for easyJet. As I walked away from the aircraft, it felt like a tidal wave of darkness was sweeping across the world towards us.

The next morning I drove empty roads to an empty airport. An empty train to Luton. An empty aircraft home to Inverness. I wouldn't leave home again until July 2021.

3 Weeks from grounded to national

The first call

At easyJet, I'd been a peer support mentor. Grounded, at home, I called the clinical lead of both easyJet and BA's peer support programmes:

"I think there's something we can do here as aircrew to support NHS staff."

He introduced me to Dave Fielding. We spoke for an hour. Dave had been thinking along similar lines. He had contacts inside the NHS through the Whittington Hospital. I had the platform to mobilise aircrew, Captain Emma had just featured in an ITV documentary, and after 30 years around aviation, people knew who I was.

Three weeks after that first phone call, we launched our first lounge at the Whittington. Then the Royal Free. Then it went across London like dominoes.

750

Volunteers in three days
One email address. One call for aircrew to help. 750 responses inside 72 hours.

6500

Grounded aircrew across the UK
Pilots, cabin crew, engineers, signing up to support NHS staff at the frontline.

104

NHS lounges nationwide
Plus two in New York. Serving frontline staff every day through the pandemic.

Structure, not hope

You don't scale that fast on adrenaline. You scale it on structure.

We built six regions across the London, Scotland and Northern Ireland, North, South East, South West, and Midlands. Each region had an implementation lead and an operations lead. Beneath them, team leaders held a point of contact for every hospital. Beneath those, team leaders coordinated every shift.

A cascade of authority. Everyone with a clear decision-making mandate up to a set budget. Anything beyond it came up the chain. Weekly meetings with 150 people on the call.

Most of our regional leads were airline captains. They already knew how to hold that scale of responsibility. Because that's exactly what a flight deck teaches you.

We didn't wing it. That's the point.

"The best thing to happen to aviation in 2020."

- The Points Guy

What it taught me about leadership

The thing that scales isn't charisma or crisis energy. It's structure.

Give people a clear framework, a decision-making mandate they can hold with confidence, and the trust to act inside it, and you can move a national organisation faster than most companies move a departmental restructure.

That's the leadership lesson I now bring into every keynote.

MBE - 2021 New Year Honours

For founding and leading Project Wingman - one of the final honours approved jointly by HM Queen Elizabeth II and HRH Prince Philip.

Other notable awards and nominations for Emma & Project Wingman include: