Mommy Pilots Ninety-Nines and the Southeast Section of The Ninety-Nines awarded our first ever Mommy Pilots Scholarship in April 2017. We had excellent applicants. We hope those who applied this year will continue to apply and if you missed the application deadline this year, please, try again in 2018. It's my privilege to announce the winner of the 2017 Mommy Pilots Scholarship-- Maria from the Alabama 99s Chapter! I hope you enjoy reading her introduction blog post as much as I did. Congratulations, Maria! -- Liz, Mommy Pilots 99s Chairwoman
I’ve wanted to be a pilot since I was 10 years old and I attended my first airshow. I had always been interested in space travel because of watching shuttle launches on TV, and actually seeing general aviation airplanes in person for the first time convinced me I wanted to learn to fly. I had seen airliners and some military aircraft before, but something about the smaller planes and the vintage warbirds really interested me and made me think that flying was something I wanted to do. Years later I got to take a Young Eagles flight, my first flight in any airplane, and I loved it even more than I thought I would.
Over the years I attended airshows and looked at planes and thought it would be cool to learn to fly, but it really seemed out of reach for a person with poor eyesight, limited funds, and who wasn’t in the military. I graduated from the University of North Alabama with a Master’s Degree in Education, in 2007, and began a career as a teacher, having pushed dreams of flying to the side, but never quite out of mind. In 2014, I saw a flyer intended for high school girls to encourage them to learn to fly and I went to the event it advertised. I realized learning to fly wasn’t as expensive as I had originally thought, and my poor eyesight was a thing of the past, as I had LASEK a few years before. I was seven months pregnant, so I thought, maybe later…
After my son was born I had one of those hormonally fueled new mom moments where you feel like the rest of your life will only be an endless stream of childcare duties and complained to my husband that I would never get to do some of things I always wanted to do like see the world or fly airplanes. Of course, I love my son, I didn’t mean it as any slight to him, but I didn’t want to think the other things that interested me were off the table. After gently reminding me that babies do grow up, my husband said, well you should do some of those things then.
A few months later I started lessons and have had a blast so far. It’s been both more and less challenging than I thought it would be. I’m more of an arts and language person than a math and physics person, so learning the math of aviation requires a lot of practice for me. Visualizing some concepts you need to understand well requires me to draw a picture or wave my arms around to “see” what other people seem to understand just from reading the definition. But, growing more capable in an airplane definitely breeds confidence in other areas of life, and actually flying the plane is definitely worth the other hours spent studying.
A bonus about learning to fly that I hadn’t anticipated was being part of the aviation community. From the very first lesson I have met so many friendly people. I’m about the only female where I fly, and everybody there has been encouraging from day one, offering advice, asking me questions, and even making me a leather seat cushion because I’m so short! Finding out about the 99s and the Mommy Pilots of the 99s really widened that aviation community for me, because I met more women who fly, from military pilots to other students, and that was really encouraging. I went to the first of what I hope will be many 99s events when I attended the Southeast Section’s Fall 2016 conference and learned a lot as well as meeting more women pilots.
I’m really excited and grateful to receive the first Mommy Pilots of the 99s Scholarship and hope to be a good ambassador for the 99s, the Mommy Pilots of the 99s, and the Alabama 99s in the future. You can read about my training and anything aviation related I’ve written about on my blog at www.wavingatairplanes.com.
