Yvonne Trueman
From Women Aviators
Yvonne Trueman (? - ) is a British aviator, who has lived in Bahrain since the 1970s, where she is the only person to hold a Bahrainian pilot's license.
(The Kingdom of Bahrain is an island microstate in the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia lies to the west and is connected to Bahrain by the King Fahd Causeway, opened in November 1986. Qatar is to the southeast across the Gulf of Bahrain.)
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Childhood
Yvonne grew up in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England. Hatfied is an aircraft town "through and through."
Yvonne pointed out to an interviewer: "If you were born in Wales you went into the mines, in the same way, if you were born in Hatfield you went into aviation." (She entered aviation in the sense that she worked for an aircraft company - not that she became a pilot!)
de Havilland Aircraft
After graduating from Hatfield Technical College, Yvonne went to work for the de Havilland Aircraft Company. She became the personal assistant to the chief test pilot John Cunningham (who made his name as an exceptional night fighter pilot during the Second World War, earning the nickname "Cats Eyes" Cunningham).
Whie at de Havilland, Yvonne saw the invention of the world's first jet-liner, the de Havilland Comet, which made its maiden flight in July 1949 -- giving the British a five-year lead over their American rivals.
Family Aviation Business
In 1963, she left de Havilland to marry and set up a family aviation business. It was not until this point that she actually learned to fly and earned her UK PPL and night rating after three months of training.
Subsequently, she joined the family aviation business and travelled the world engaged in sales and marketing.
She also compiled several flight guides for private pilots and worked as a correspondent in Switzerland.
Finally, she worked as an aircraft broker (selling aircraft to the uninitiated), and it was in this capacity that she first came to Bahrain in the late 70s.
Yvonne was invited to join The 99s by Sheila Scott in 1974.
She moved with her family to Bahrain in the late 1970s. There was little flying there, due to the lack of small aircraft on the island, as well as the security situation.
She also flew in Dubai during the first Gulf War when Kuwait was invaded.
At the time Yvonne was due to fly her check rating and she said: "No-one knew when the ground invasion would start. We booked an aircraft, did our flight plan and took off on February 24, 1991.
"Oblivious to this dramatic event, we were airborne and well into our itinerary by the time we realised what was happening.
"Flying high above the UAE, we had a bird's eye view of all the activity moving out of Abu Dhabi, the field ambulance in Fujairah and the activity out of Dubai.
"It must have seemed very strange to the folks on the ground to View this tiny Piper Warrior aircraft flying amongst the military movement. That was really an unforgettable experience."
Yvonne also served as a co-pilot during the Iran/Iraq war, ferrying passengers out of Baghdad to Kuwait.
She said: "That was a novel experience as, in those days, to see a woman pilot was really quite unusual in the Arab world."
Yvonne joined, and later became Governor of, the Arabian Section of the 99s and, at her party, she was celebrating recruiting five new members in the last month alone.
She said: "My area runs from Egypt to Oman and I have just taken on Afghanistan as well and we have female pilots signing up from across the area. A member has recently joined from Iran, we have members flying commercially in both Bahrain and Qatar and I have just enrolled a new woman from Afghanistan who is there with the UN Food Programme.
"It's an exciting time for women pilots in this part of the world as our network is really expanding, we now have more members than many of the European countries which is particularly pleasing since flying is much less common among women here."
Yvonne has flown all around the world. She holds British, American, New Zealand and Bahrain pilot's licences as well as a seaplane rating which she earned in Florida.
Family
Captain Julian Pooley, Yvonne's son, was a helicopter pilot in the British Army. He died in a road accident in 1994 while stationed in Belize. It was only after his death that Yvonne learned he had been actively involved with the orphanage, Dorothy Menzies Child Care Home in Belize, which she continues to support to this day in his memory.
Her brother, Derek Pereira, founded Dreamflight in 1986. This program takes seriously ill children on a 10-day journey-of-a-lifetime in Disney World, Orlando, Florida, US. Yvonne has been Dreamflight Bahrain’s chief fund-raiser for the last five years, but has been involved in Dreamflight since her brother Derek Pereira founded it in 1986.
Honors
In 2005, Yvonne Trueman was awarded an MBE by Queen Elizabeth II.
References
- Gulf Weekly On the Wings of a Dream
- Bahrain Embassy Little Gems to Help Orphans
- Good News Blog Queen honours volunteer Yvonne
