keendog, no problem. That's really the information I was after. As you can imagine, this place has been used for less-than-scrupulous intelligence gathering before!
This young lady's chance of being an FO with BA by the end of 2001 were statistically fairly remote. As I remember (I went through - and passed - the BA selection for direct-entry pilot myself in 1998), A-level maths was not a requirement for cadets, but it may have improved her chances a little. If she possessed the minimum educational, age and other requirements, which should be easy to establish, she would have been invited to apply on BA's standard application form. This collected a fair amount of personal information, and required essay-type answers to five questions. These essays were crucial to a candidate's chances of being invited for interview. I believe that the ratio of applicants to interviewees was in the range of at least a thousand to one for most of the period in question.
The interview procedure covered two days, and included several examinations (maths, verbal reasoning, psychological profiling etc.), plus a number of group exercises, to determine whether the individuals had the kind of personality, business awareness, team spirit and determination that BA felt was incumbent in their pilot group. The ratio of failure to success at this stage was 10 to 1 or greater.
Success at interview did not mean that the job was in the bag. I don't remember what aptitude testing BA carried out (for me it was a simulator flight, but that would have been inappropriate for ab-initio cadets), but it would have had an inherent chance of failure - though I can't quantify that. Finally, the 18-month training process from first flight to airline flight deck saw a small proportion of students wash out.
This is a very long way of explaining that mad_jock's figures are spot on, but I hope that perhaps now you can understand why. Without meeting and assessing this girl by BA's standards, it's impossible to suggest what her individual chances were, but statistically it was about 1 in 25000 against succeeding - and that's assuming she qualified to apply.
Scroggs