Silva McLeod has been fascinated with planes since she was “just a tiny snotty kid” and they were nothing more than a rare object flying high above her small village in Tonga.
Well into her teens she held her wish of becoming a pilot close to her chest, not daring to say the “fantasy” aloud.
“I would be laughed at. I would be mocked,” the 62-year-old told news.com.au as she reflected on her incredible journey to become an Australian airline pilot.
Living in Vava’u, Tonga, she was only expected to become a wife and a mother.
She recalls her Grandma, who raised her, saying: “Don’t forget if you lose your virginity before marriage, you’ll be left on the shelf.”
She was determined to break the “island cycle” and the first step was finding a job so she didn’t have to rush into marriage.
At 18, she became a waitress at the only hotel in Vava’u. It was there she would ironically meet her future husband, Ken.
Ken was an Australian electrician and one of three Aussies sent to the island to work on a Commonwealth aid project. He would change the course of her life.
In the early days dating in Tonga, Silva remembers not understanding why Ken was with her.
“I was quite dark skin. White skin is classed as pretty on the island so I was classed as the ugly duckling,” she said.
But she says he kept proving he was there for her, even when he was put to the test visiting her village.
“Teenage kids … they stabbed his tyres, he got rocks thrown at him. How on earth he kept coming? I had no idea,” she said.
During their time dating, Silva describes a “weak moment” when she said her dream aloud for the very first time.
“I can still see the scene on a Sunday at the beach. You’re not supposed to go the beach on Sunday so the beach was quite vacant. Ken was a white person so he of course can go to the beach if he wants, so I tag along,” she explained.
Ken asked the young woman if she had a dream and she hesitantly revealed it was to fly a plane.
“I was waiting for that mocking to start or laugh but he didn’t,” she said.
It wasn’t spoken about again for another 10 years.
Ken had just been diagnosed with cancer and by this point the pair were married and living in Australia with their two children.
“I thought it was dying man talk,” she said.
As Silva said goodbye to Ken as he went off for his first day of chemotherapy at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, his words shocked her.
“When he hugged me he goes ‘do you still want to fly?’ and I nearly bolted out of his embrace,” she laughed.
For her next birthday she was given the gift of being a passenger on a 20-minute joy flight. She says “a monster was created on that day”.
“It was never a dream to be an airline pilot. I didn’t think I had what it took. I just wanted to fly,” she said.
Silva was 31 years old, with two children and her husband had been given five years to live, but with Ken’s support she did what seemed like the impossible.
She went on to become an instructor and then flew for Royal Tongan Airlines, the Royal Flying Doctor Service and most recently, Virgin Australia.
Silva was the first Tongan woman to become an airline pilot.
“I didn’t do it to write history or be the first of such. It was just my fantasy that I went to fulfil,” she explained.
The dream to fly for her national airline emerged when Silva boarded a plane for the first time as 20-year-old to move to Australia with her new husband. However, back then she still considered it only a fantasy.
“The pilot delivered the safety briefing in English,” she said. “I look around and the whole aeroplane is Tongan but my husband and I thought none of them understand. If we crashed no one would know how to put on a life jacket.”
More than a decade later she would defy all odds and make history delivering the first safety briefing in her native tongue.
Flash forward to 2020 and everything came crashing down for Silva.
She lost “both of her loves” within three months: Ken to cancer and her job as a pilot at Virgin Australia during lay-offs because of the Covid pandemic.
The night of Ken’s service, Silva started writing about their incredible life as a form of therapy and this month she published their story as a book, Island Girl to Airline Pilot.
“It was like opening a floodgate in every way; physically with tears (and) emotionally with heartache,” she said, adding it kept her occupied in a lonely Covid lockdown and she found solace in their happy memories.
“I could either sink or swim, or should I say I could either land or take flight, and I took the latter and decided to keep going by sharing our journey.”
Silva has not ruled out flying again, hoping to get back in the air with Virgin Australia.
Her book is available to purchase now.