Dream Big: Youngest Female Captain

Liney Lozano qualifies in industry where only six per cent of pilots are women. In Colombia, she is not only breaking those gender barriers. A woman who fell in love with planes as a child has become the youngest captain of Colombia’s Avianca Airline.

Young woman said she was just 14 years old when she decided she wanted to be a commercial airline pilot. Her family supported her, and by age 22, she had accumulated the 200 hours of flight school required to graduate as a pilot. “The feeling of flying solo is incomparable to anything else. You only do it in flight school, because when you start working at an airline you always have a copilot, so it is simply unforgettable,” Liney Lozano said during her interview.

But becoming a pilot is far from the average career path for little girls in Colombia, a country where gender stereotypes are common and beauty pageants outnumber those held just about anywhere else in the world. In November 2015, Lozano accomplished what she set out to do she became Avianca Airlines youngest pilot captain at age 27 (youngest female captain as well). According to the Colombian Association of Civil Aviators, women make up less than 4 percent of the country’s total pilots.

Lozano said it’s important to show Colombian girls they can reach beyond dreams of becoming a star through beauty pageants. Instead, she said she encourages them to see that the sky’s the limit.

Avianca S.A. has been the national airline and flag carrier of Colombia since 5 December 1919, when it was initially registered under the name SCADTA. Avianca is the world's second oldest airline after KLM, and celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2009, when it was announced that it would merge with TACA.