Yvonne Pope Sintes obituary

On holiday in Sweden in the late 1940s, a teenager was given, by her perhaps indulgent father, her first flight. The aircraft was a Scandinavian Airlines System’s Douglas DC4 Skymaster, heading from Stockholm to Gothenberg. The experience remained “almost unreal”, Yvonne Pope Sintes, who has died aged 90, wrote in her autobiography, Trailblazer in Flight (2013). “My complete absorption and assimilation of every precious moment, high above the snowy white clouds in the glorious sunshine, was so intense that time both stood still, and yet flashed by.”

More than 20 years later, on 14 February 1970, the one-time teenager in the SAS DC4 became one of Britain’s first female jet airline pilots. She was co-piloting what had been the world’s first commercial jet airliner, a Dan-Air De Havilland Comet 4, which she described as a “magnificent aircraft”. The flight was to Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, and it “wasn’t until we were on the long stretch from Lisbon to the Canary Islands that I really appreciated that we were serenely flying over the Atlantic at 35,000 ft”.

After flying some 1,032 hours on Comets, Pope Sintes was offered her own command, on an Avro 748. The 748 was effectively a turbo-prop successor to the Douglas DC3 Dakota, which had been the workhorse of world aviation since the 30s, and with which Pope Sintes was very familiar.

On 20 March 1972, Pope Sintes took off from Leeds, bound initially for Glasgow. Reactions among passengers to hearing a female voice from the flight deck varied. “Men were reasonably pragmatic on the whole,” she wrote, “probably thinking it must be all right if the company allowed me to be in the cockpit. The ladies initially seemed more dubious, perhaps thinking that only men flew aeroplanes, when in fact women in the Air Transport Auxilary flew all types of aircraft from the small Tiger Moth to the biggest bombers during the second world war.”

Pope Sintes’s pioneering work continued. In 1974 she captained an Avro 748 flying Gatwick-Bristol-Beauvais-Gatwick with, for the first time in British aviation history, an all-female crew. Dan-Air did not publicise this quiet breakthrough. Then on 16 June 1975 she became the first woman to take command of a jet airliner, a BAC 1-11.

She was born in Pretoria, South Africa, the eldest of three daughters. Her mother, Iris (nee Kyle), was a teacher, and her father, Marcel van de Hoek, was made overseas manager of the South African Citrus Exchange when Yvonne was a child. As a result the family moved to Purley, in Surrey. She was, in her own words, “a quiet, shy and serious child”. Both parents were music lovers, as their daughter would be.

In the wake of the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940 the family, without Marcel, moved back to Pretoria and, later, Cape Town. In Pretoria Yvonne was educated at St Mary’s diocesan school and in Cape Town at a state school.

Focusing on flying stories and the war, her hero was the nightfighter ace John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham. A serious problem with her left leg meant Yvonne was bedbound for six months and on crutches for three, but the Biggles books of Captain WE Johns kept her entertained. Back in Britain in 1946 she resumed her education at the Commonweal Lodge school in Purley. It was around then that she enjoyed her Swedish holiday, which concluded, courtesy of her father, with an unexpected second flight, back to Britain in a British European Airways DC3 Dakota.

Following the breakup of her parents’ marriage in 1947, her mother moved the family back to South Africa. There Yvonne spent a year at Rhodes University studying European languages in Grahamstown (now Makhanda) in the Eastern Cape province, before returning to the UK.

She eventually got a flight attendant job with Scottish Airlines and then with the British Overseas Airways Corporation (then the British long-haul, state-owned carrier), flying on Argonauts, a noisy but serviceable DC4 variant. The schedule took her to the Middle East, and later on to Latin America.

In 1952 she had her first flying lesson, in a Miles Magister. “I also had the strange feeling I was walking towards my destiny,” she wrote. After four months she received her private pilot’s licence, and in 1958 a commercial licence.

She married Eric Pope, a flying instructor, in 1953. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage the day after the birth of their second son, Chris, in 1957. The need for a reasonable income became more pressing and, after a time based in Exeter working as an instructor, it was suggested that she train to become an air traffic controller with the Ministry of Aviation.

The training was at Hurn airport, Bournemouth, which was then in Hampshire. She was a woman in what had been hitherto a male world, that of air control, and this led to what she described as “one of the least enjoyable periods of my life”. But she did become one of the two first British female flight controllers.

In 1966 her flying career began with Morton Air Services. In the same year, in Menorca, she met Miguel Sintes, a waiter and former medical student who had worked as a paramedic during the Spanish civil war. They married in 1970, and, following her retirement in 1980, they settled on the island.

Pope Sintes received many accolades, including, in 1960, the Brabazon Cup for her work as an instructor and, in 1965, the International Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association award for best air traffic controller in Europe.

She was a member of the NinetyNines International Organisation of Women Pilots. In 1974 Princess Anne presented Pope Sintes with the Whitney Straight award “to recognise the achievements and status of women in aviation”. Among the guests on that occasion was Cunningham, her childhood hero.

After Miguel’s death in 1999 Pope Sintes returned to the UK.

Her son John died earlier this year. She is survived by her other son Chris, a granddaughter, Samantha, and grandson, Lewis, and two great-grandchildren.

Yvonne Elizabeth Pope Sintes, pilot and air traffic controller, born 8 September 1930; died 16 August 2021