When Czarena Hashim checked her mailbox last month, she was surprised to find a handwritten letter from a four-year-old.

“My daddy told me you fly planes,” it read. “I would like to fly one day too, just like you.”

As Hashim reads the child’s words aloud, her colleague – First Officer Nadiah Khashiem – wells up beside her. “That girl’s going to be a pilot some day,” she says, beaming.

It’s a sunny morning in central London and I’m having tea with Royal Brunei Airlines’ first ever all-female flight deck crew. On February 23 this year, Captain Czarena Hashim and First Officers Dk Nadiah Pg Khashiem and Sariana Nordin made history when they flew from Brunei International to the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah. A few weeks later a cockpit selfie of the trio -posted on Instagram by the airline - went viral. Global headlines soon followed.

Statistically speaking, an all-female manned flight deck is still an unusual occurrence in 2016. The International Society of Women Airline Pilots (ISA) estimated recently that just 4,000 of the 130,000 pilots worldwide are women. That’s three per cent. Here in the UK, that statistic rises marginally according to the Civil Aviation Authority, to just under six per cent. I tell the women how shocked I was at these meagre numbers. “So were we!” they exclaim in unison.