Chinook Crew 'Chick': Highs and Lows of Forces Life from the Longest Serving Female RAF Chinook Force Crewmember

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I was expecting yet another mediocre aircrew memoir with a few humorous stories, acronyms, and inflated tales of daring deeds. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. During this month, Airfix is proud to highlight some key contributions of women throughout history, as part of an exciting campaign celebrating Women’s History Month, March 2023. Yesterday I was once again able to join over 400 extraordinary women at the 69th Women of the Year Lunch and Awards. By sharing her journey coping through PTSD enabled our people to get a better understanding of the condition and most importantly, how to manage it.

The biggest honour of all her duties, however, was serving on the Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT), or the flying ambulance as it was more commonly known. Does McConaghy have any words of wisdom for people thinking of following the same kind of career path? We didn’t personalise who were in the body bags because we knew it would have such a detrimental effect on our mental health.But as overwhelmingly shaken and upset as I am, I also know that no one wakes up in the morning and thinks I’m going to deliberately fuck up today…. But she also knows the experience almost killed her and wants others in a similar position to know they can get help. When asked what she missed most about the military, McConaghy placed an emphasis on “the people, the banter, the chats” but also said she misses “the smell of the aircraft”. Highly recommended and being from NI myself i was looking forward too reading it, as someone who was briefly in the RAF but decided to leave makes me think what could have been! I knew that things were really coming unravelled one night when I couldn’t sleep and at about 4am I was Googling some of the soldiers that we’d picked up.

Having witnessed horrific scenarios, Liz began to struggle with her mental health, attempting to take her own life in 2020.This was one of the deadliest war zones in the world – crawling with Taliban insurgents – where British, American and Afghan forces were trying to secure peace in a country which had known nothing but war for decades. By way of a parting message for readers, McConaghy appeals to anyone going through similar issues she has experienced to seek help. In 2005, Liz was first deployed to Afghanistan and she’d go on to complete 10 tours as part of the medical helicopter response team providing emergency assistance to wounded personnel. She left the forces in 2019 and went on to a career with a disabled flying charity to help support those same wounded soldiers into flying scholarships. In 2020, Liz suffered extensively with her mental health due to the onset of PTSD following almost two decades at war.