Salli-Ann Ward appointed as first female pilot to run NSW PolAir
She used to serve meals for heli-mustering pilots at an outback cattle station but after deciding to get her own pilot licence, Salli-Ann Ward hasn’t looked back. She is now the first woman to be appointed as the NSW Police Force’s chief pilot.
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Salli-Ann Ward was serving meals for heli-mustering pilots on an outback cattle station when she decided to stop cooking and start flying.
Thirty years later she has become the first woman to be NSW Police Force’s chief pilot.
“I was at that stage where it was my sabbatical year before I went to uni so I was really looking for what I could do,” Ward told The Sunday Telegraph.
“Then it suddenly dawned on me that, gee they gave these guys a licence — surely I would be able to get one. So that’s where it started.”
Ms Ward is in charge of the Aviation Support Branch, which is about to undergo a massive expansion with construction on a new air base underway and three new aircraft about to join the fleet.
The Bankstown-based branch already has five helicopters and three small planes, which are deployed all over the state.
One day they are tracking a car chase through Sydney’s southwest, the next they are running surveillance from the skies ahead of a major police operation and the day after they are rescuing someone on a rock ledge in the Blue Mountains.
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Each year the 40-year-old branch clocks about 3500 flying hours, which also includes transporting police divers, tactical operations unit or other specialist teams to urgent jobs around the state.
On a good day, a helicopter crew can be up in the air within two minutes to respond to an urgent job.
While Ms Ward’s position as chief pilot means she oversees the branch’s entire fleet, she still clocks flying hours in the fixed wing aircraft every week.
Before joining the air wing four and a half years ago as a pilot, Ms Ward was a flight instructor running her own business out of Bathurst.
She doubled as a charter pilot, flying corporate types to rural locations or medical staff to hospitals, before deciding she needed a change.
A job at the aviation support branch popped up and, despite doubting she would get a look in, Ms Ward applied.
“I thought there was younger, brighter and shinier pilots,” she joked.
As the youngest of four sisters growing up on a West Australian farm, where everyone had to chip in driving the tractor, Ms Ward never saw gender as a barrier to becoming a pilot.
While the industry has been traditionally male-dominated, she said university degrees in aviation have opened the field to women.
As for getting more females into senior positions in the police force, she sees gender targets in the hierarchy as a positive step because it gets people thinking.
“Some of the guys have said: ‘Oh why will I go study for a sergeant’s position when they are going to give it to all of the women’?” she explained.
“Whereas I could have thought that about my flying, why would I continue flying when those charter positions are always recruited men?
“You have to think what are my skills, it is not about your gender. What are my skills? What can I offer?”
There are 77 sworn and unsworn officers in the branch, including about a dozen female officers.
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