AMMAN: Saudi Arabia’s first woman pilot hopes all women in the conservative Islamic kingdom will one day have the freedom she now enjoys.

Wearing a scarf and a pilot’s shirt and trousers, Hanadi Hindi shyly admits she found it difficult to make the transition from a veiled, sheltered life in Saudi Arabia to a much less restrictive routine in Jordan, where she is in training.

“But after seven months in Jordan, I feel I’m a new and different person. Now I can make my own decisions,” Hindi said as she inspected a small American Piper Archer 2000 plane on the runway in Marka airport near the capital Amman.

Hindi, 24, comes from a very religious family from Makkah.Her eyes fill with tears as she mentions her father, who had always wanted to become a pilot himself.

He encouraged Hindi to break with centuries-old traditions and live his dream, brushing off harsh criticism from relatives and friends and sending her to Jordan’s Mideast Aviation Academy where she studies flying with two other women and 70 men.

Hindi has four sisters and two brothers, and a very conservative mother who is still angry at being forced to let her daughter go. Saudi women were thrust into the spotlight in 1991 when tens of thousands of US troops, including women, were stationed in the country for the Gulf War.

The presence of Western women encouraged several Saudi women to publicly protest the ban on driving.—Reuters