“Don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t easy, and as a CFI I’ve seen how hard it can be for some students to commit to it,” she said. “A lot of people drop out for different reasons. But there’s nothing fundamentally hard about it, either. It’s exciting! It’s fun! You get this really clear goal in mind, with really clearly-defined objectives for how to get there; then, the biggest hurdle you have is just to stick to it. The rewards for sticking to it are tremendous: I’ve now traveled to so many of the places on my bucket list I’ve had to make a new bucket list. The pilot shortage is real, so the demand is real, and it’s made our pay go up significantly across the board because everyone is trying to get good pilots and retain them. I think that fact alone makes it a really good career to go into. The opportunities are there, is what I’m saying.” Women currently represent just six percent of the pilots in the workforce and it’s a stat Kazmierczak’s eager to change: while she was the Assistant Chief Instructor at FXE, many of her students were women. One of her first students as a CFI was just 17 years old when she started and has stuck with it. Kazmierczak recently invited the student to Journey Aviation, to see—and be inspired by—the inside of that GIV cockpit. “I wish I would have discovered this years ago, as a teenager,” Kazmierczak said. “I wanted to get her in this airplane just to see it, to see what’s possible, to help her put that end goal in mind that was so motivating for me, and to give her a chance to talk to some of the same pilots who first inspired me.” And, oh, about that Gulfstream IV, “Even out of all the private jets, Gulfstreams are known for being really great, extremely reliable, over-powered in a good way,” she said. “It’s really an incredibly-engineered plane, to such a caliber that it makes me very proud to be flying one. For me, the feeling is almost out of this world. Just being up at altitude, looking out that window, when it hadn’t even occurred to me a few short years ago that I would ever be an airplane pilot…I have the biggest, cheesiest smile on my face all the time when I’m up there.” Kazmierczak is also drawn to all the other parts of the job, from flight planning to interacting with her passengers, and said she feels her past experience as a cabin aide has helped her in her new role. “A lot of my crewmembers say I’m extra valuable because I speak both languages, I’ve seen it from both sides, I understand what’s going on in every part of the plane, and it’s something that both the pilots and the cabin aides have come to really understand and respect about me,” she explained. “It’s definitely handy to have had these dual experiences.” Telling her story has become a popular pastime for some of her previous peers among the company’s employees. Said Kazmierczak, “At the Christmas party last year, when I had just come back to Journey, there was a lot of ‘Oh my goodness, this is Carolina, let me tell you her story, she was one of our cabin aides and now she’s one of our pilots!’ I’m hoping it will come full-circle and I’ll be able to inspire one of them to go take that first discovery flight and come join me in the cockpit in a few years.” Continued on page 32 Women currently represent just six percent of the pilots in the workforce. Aviation Business Journal | Summer 2019 31 6%
