Air Commodore Barbara Cooper, Commander of the Order of the British Empire is a retired British Royal Air Force officer and former Commandant of the Air Cadet Organisation.
Education
She lived in Worcestershire, where she attended Evesham High School. Finding she missed the Service, she chose to return to the WRAF, entering the Administrative Branch as a flight lieutenant on 16 October 1987 with seniority from 16 April 1987.
Career
She was promoted to Air Commodore in 2008 and became the Royal Air Force"s highest-ranking female. She previously served at the tri-Service military Defence Academy in Shrivenham as Division Director. Born in Canada, Cooper moved with her family to Britain aged eleven.
On a short service commission in 1979, Cooper joined the Women"s Royal Air Force (WRAF) in the role of air-traffic controller, at a time when far fewer women were in the Service.
She served for seven years. She was promoted from flying officer to flight lieutenant on 3 June 1984.
She transferred to the reserves on 2 February 1985. On leaving, she went on to gain qualifications in property management.
Since the 1980s, Cooper has had a number of postings, including as staff officer to the Chief of the Air Staff (the most senior position in the Royal Air Force).
During the Gulf War, she had responsibility for running the Prisoner of War Information Bureau, acting as liaison to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Cooper was promoted to squadron leader on 5 January 1993, and to wing commander on 1 July 1997. She served a two-year tenure at Royal Air Force Lyneham (to March 2000), in which Wing Commander Cooper was in charge of base support and where her staff provided operational support for troop movements to Sierra Leone.
Thereafter she was stationed at Joint Services Command and Staff College (JSCSC) at Shrivenham, which relocated there in the same year.
In the second Gulf Conflict, Cooper served as Deputy Director Service Personnel Policy (Operations and Manning), which includes operational welfare policy, and included reporting before the government Select Committee on Defence. In 2005, Cooper assumed the role of Director Royal Air Force Division at the Defence Academy, which formed in April 2002 as a consolidation of the constituent colleges such as the JSCSC, and Royal College of Defence Studies.
At the beginning of the following year, Cooper was promoted from Group Captain to the rank of Air Commodore, becoming the most senior female officer in the British armed forces. From May 2010 she became the senior officer responsible for running the Air Cadet Organisation (ACO).
Her first public appearance in her new Commandant role followed one week later at the Cadet150 reception commemorating 150 years of the Cadet Forces of the tri-Service military.
The following month she attended the second of the two sesquicentenary events, a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace, where she spoke to Air Training Corps members from all over the United Kingdom.