As a little girl growing up in South Africa, Asnath Mahapa loved watching the lights of airplanes flying overhead. Little did she know that her sky gazing would soon pay off. Mahapa is South Africa’s first black female pilot.
Mahapa says she was fascinated by aircrafts early on. “It just dawned on me that those big things that we see in the skies, someone is actually in charge of them,” she told CNN. “I thought if someone can fly this thing, that means I can also do it.”
She eventually dropped out of an electrical engineering program at the University of Cape Town to study flight. Her pursuit wasn’t without challenges. Not only was she the only woman in her flight classes, but the first few times she flew, she got incredibly ill. “I was persistent. I went back again. I went back until I stopped feeling sick,” she explained.
After making history as South Africa’s first black female pilot in 1998, Mahapa didn’t stop there. She wanted to use her platform to make sure more women could make it in aviation. She opened the African College of Aviation in 2012 to help train the next generation of budding female flight talent.
“For me it’s about trying to help women who aspire to become pilots,” she said. “I still see a lot of black women going through the same things that I went through at that time.”
She hopes her success will help inspire other young women to take to the skies. “If I can change the world, I would tell the girls, ‘Go out there, do it,’ and I will tell the boys there is nothing wrong with a girl becoming a pilot, [or] becoming an astronaut, for that matter.”
