I first discovered planes when I was 11 years old. My dad took me to an airshow. One of the acrobatic planes had a female pilot and I was blown away – I didn’t know women could do that. From that moment I wanted to be a pilot.
Learning to fly planes was very difficult because early on I experienced motion sickness. Military flight training helps you overcome it, though. They put you in a spinning chair and then give you a task. You do that every day for a week or two, until you get used to it. After 13 years of flying, I’m now an aircraft commander at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a US government agency that does weather forecasting and climate monitoring.
