Before I was here

Continuing our series into the past lives of University staff, Contact interviews Andrea Batey. Now a lecturer in the law department, once upon a time, Andrea was a flight traffic controller for the Royal Air Force.

As days go, no schedule could be as different from a day in the RAF to that in Dundee's law department. Andrea Batey joined the RAF a year after she left school in 1987 and found herself undergoing the initial officer training - a daily series of obstacle courses and trudging over bleak moorland before being appointed to the console controlling the daily air traffic of the RAF.

Air traffic in the RAF however is not quite as neat and well ordered as a commercial operation. Andrea would start work at 7.30am in a dark airfield at Leuchars and after seeing the aircrafts off on their missions, a day could pass slowly and uneventfully before the sound of the radios and the formations suddenly approaching threw her into action. She explained; "I often worked with the phantom aircraft - the most arrogant lot in the RAF who did not like being told what to do. They would be coming in, supposedly in formation but would be flying all over the place. All these dots were pinging about across my screen making it very difficult to bring them all in."

Andrea had lived near an airfield as a little girl, her grandfather had been in the Navy, she'd always had a romantic view of the RAF and was attracted to the thrill and the pace of life in the forces. The reality was most definitely a bit different but she enjoyed every minute of it. "It was a fantastic single person's life - full of challenges and fun."

Andrea left the RAF in 1993 to start her law degree here at the University of Dundee. She said: "I couldn't believe the difference when I started studying in first year. There was one particular lecturer who had a habit of yelling at us like children. I was used to being saluted and called ma'am and suddenly I was being screamed at like a schoolgirl. It took a bit of getting used to. In the RAF we had to be very smartly turned out for work and then as a student I found myself kicking around in jeans and sweaters.

But Andrea thrived on her new academic career. She found that the rigorous routine she was used to in the RAF had taught her the self-discipline that she needed in the academic world. On graduation she was offered a position teaching criminal law by Fiona Raitt, head of the law department. She is now assisting Professor Alan Page with his research on devolution and is publishing her first paper combining her legal expertise and her experience in the RAF in the Juridicial Review this quarter.

Her article examines the controversial circumstances surrounding the RAF Chinook helicopter crash in June 1994. It discusses the authority of military boards of inquiry to pass judgement on the conduct of an aircrew commensurate to a criminal charge and questions the function of a Royal Air Force Board of inquiry. Andrea explains: "The Chinook case has unwittingly unleashed a public scrutiny of the machinery of military accident investigation that invokes a strong sense of justice."

Her research coupled with teaching seems to be fulfilling Andrea's thirst for a challenge and with her former career now fuelling her current research interest it seems that the move to academia has worked out quite nicely.

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