Before the Sky Was Mine
My name is Daniela, and long before I ever touched a yoke, I was simply “Miss Daniela” — the English teacher with stickers tucked in her drawer and coffee running through her veins. I lived in Bogotá with my husband, our two young kids, and a job so stable my mother mentioned it to strangers as if it were a national award.
“Mi hija es profesora,” she’d say proudly. “En una escuela buena. De inglés.”
On paper, it sounded impressive — right up until you watched me survive a Monday morning with thirty fourth-graders and a photocopier that challenged me more than any exam ever had.
From the outside, my life looked complete: a steady job, a loving family, a modest apartment with a view of the city rooftops. Nothing missing.
Except that every time an airplane crossed the Bogotá sky, something inside me lifted with it — a small pull, a familiar ache, as if a part of me was still trying to escape into the clouds and become a pilot one day.
I tried to quiet it. I told myself I was a grown woman with responsibilities, not a teenager lying on the grass imagining runways. But dreams are stubborn things. They seep in the way Florida humidity does — silently, insistently, until you can no longer pretend you don’t feel them.
The Secret Spreadsheet Phase
It started innocently. Late at night, after the kids finally collapsed into bed, I watched YouTube pilots explain checklists, approaches, and why they always carry snacks. It felt harmless—“research,” I told myself, in case my husband walked in.
Then came the spreadsheet. Officially titled “Holiday Fund,” but in reality:
Pilot Plan: Phase 0 — Denial.
I listed flight schools, costs, visa requirements. The numbers were horrifying, so I balanced them with side gigs:
- Private English lessons
- Weekend conversation clubs
- Teen exam-prep groups
- Anything that produced pesos
I wasn’t becoming rich, but something more dangerous was happening: the dream was turning into a plan.
The Monday That Changed Everything
One rainy Monday (the kind where even the pigeons look depressed), a small student stayed after class.
“Miss,” she asked, “what did you want to be when you were little?”
“A teacher,” I lied automatically.
She frowned. “No, what did you really want to be?”
Kids always know where to stab.
I sighed. “A pilot.”
She nodded thoughtfully, then delivered a fatal blow:
“Then you should. You tell us to follow dreams, so if you don’t, that’s lying.”
And she left me there — adult, responsible, utterly exposed — with the sudden realization that maybe I was being a hypocrite.
That night, I renamed my spreadsheet:
Pilot Plan — Real Version.
Meeting Pelican for the First Time… Online
My late-night research kept pointing to Florida — sunshine, busy airspace, and a suspicious number of flight schools. One name kept popping up:
Pelican Flight Training.
I liked it immediately. Pelicans are not glamorous birds, but they are reliable, determined, and weirdly confident. Sounded just like the kind of pilot I could become.
Pelican Flight School trained international students, had structured programs, and didn’t make me feel ridiculous for starting at thirty with two kids and a bank account that said “try again later.”
For the first time, it felt possible.
The Conversation With My Husband
It took me three attempts to tell Andrés.
Attempt 1: accidental mumbling.
Attempt 2: emotional panic.
Attempt 3: coffee, deep breath, full confession.
“I want to be a pilot,” I said. “In Florida. At Pelican. And I know it’s crazy, but I can’t stop thinking about it.”
He didn’t laugh. He just asked:
“Okay. What’s the plan?”
I knew then I married the right man.
Together, we went through my spreadsheets. He stared at some numbers like they were horror movies but finally said:
“I don’t want you to be sixty and regretting this.”
That sentence cracked my whole world open.
Leaving Bogotá
The last weeks flew by: documents, visas, bookings, hugging students goodbye, explaining to my kids that mamá wasn’t leaving — mamá was flying.
The night before my flight, my daughter asked, “Will you come back different?”
“Yes,” I said. “Stronger.”
At the airport, with too much fear and too much determination in my suitcase, I walked toward a new life — one that had waited years for me to be brave enough.
Pelican Flight School wasn’t just a place on a map anymore.
It was my runway.
And for the first time in a long time, my inner voice wasn’t saying you’re crazy.
It whispered:
Go. Take off. This time, the sky is yours.
The Long Way Up
I arrived in Florida alone. My husband stayed in Bogotá with the kids so their routines wouldn’t collapse all at once. We promised it was temporary — a few months until I settled into the program, found a rhythm, and understood what our new life might look like. Still, stepping out of the airport without them felt like walking forward while leaving a part of myself behind.
But then the heat hit me — warm, dense, unmistakably Floridian — and for the first time since making the decision, I felt a quiet certainty. I wasn’t running away from my old life. I was walking toward a new one.
My first morning at Pelican Flight School stays with me: the early light spreading across the ramp, the constant movement of instructors and students, the familiar smell of fuel in the air. Nothing dramatic happened — no big speeches, no revelations — yet something whispered inside me that I was exactly where I needed to be, even if I didn’t feel ready.
Inside the building, I walked slowly past the wall of graduate photos. Men, women, young faces, older ones — all of them captured at the moment they became something they once only hoped for. I didn’t imagine myself among them, not yet. But I felt less alone knowing they had all started from uncertainty, the same way I was now.
Learning to Begin Again
Ground school humbled me immediately. For someone who had spent years teaching others, sitting in a classroom feeling lost was jarring. Aerodynamics, regulations, weather patterns — the material was dense, layered, and entirely new.
I filled notebook after notebook. Some evenings, I studied until exhaustion forced me to stop. Other nights were harder — moments when doubts tried to creep in quietly:
Are you too old for this? Should you be with your children instead of doing this for yourself?
But I learned to breathe through those questions. To remind myself that the fear of growing is not a reason to stop.
My instructor often said, “Progress in aviation is rarely loud. It’s a quiet accumulation.”
And he was right. One day the concepts that overwhelmed me simply… settled.
It wasn’t brilliance. It was persistence.
A New View of the World
My first flight wasn’t transformative at first. I was tense, trying too hard to remember every checklist step. But the moment we lifted off the ground, something loosened inside me.
Bogotá had always felt close, crowded, familiar. Florida looked open in every direction — sky stretching far beyond anything I’d imagined. For a brief moment, I wasn’t a mother, a teacher, or a woman who had uprooted her life. I was simply a person learning to fly.
When my instructor said, “Your controls,” it didn’t feel like a triumph. It felt like a responsibility. A steady, delicate shift from imagining a dream to touching it.
That night, I called my husband and told him, “It finally feels real.”
He answered, “Good. Real things are worth the work.”
Living Between Two Worlds
Training settled into a rhythm: early mornings, flights, ground lessons, studying, fatigue, progress. I spoke to my kids every day — sometimes twice. They wanted to know everything: the shape of the airplane, the color of the sky, whether I had touched any clouds yet.
Those calls reminded me why I was here. I wanted my children to grow up knowing that choosing yourself is not abandonment — it’s example.
Ratings came one by one: Private Pilot, Instrument, Commercial. Not quickly, not easily, but steadily. Some checkrides went smoothly; others left me shaken and quiet for hours. But each step pushed me a little further away from the woman who once watched airplanes with nothing but longing.
The First Solo Flight
The morning of my first solo, the air felt strangely still. Standing by the aircraft, I felt both fear and a calm resolve I’d never experienced before.
When the wheels left the runway without an instructor beside me, I understood something I’d never understood fully: courage isn’t loud. Courage is choosing to move forward even as your hands tremble.
Landing wasn’t victory. It was confirmation. A door had opened, and I had stepped through it alone.
Teaching Others to Fly
Becoming a CFI wasn’t part of my childhood dream, but it became part of my adult purpose. Teaching flight students — especially those who carried accents, doubts, and hopes like mine — grounded me in ways I didn’t expect.
When I watched my first student lift off on their solo flight, I saw a reflection of the person I had fought to become. And I realized that every step I had taken — every late night, every fear, every sacrifice — had led me to something larger than a license.
It had led me back to myself.
Becoming Daniela Again
I am still a wife, a mother, a daughter from Bogotá. But now I am also a pilot. A woman who rebuilt her life not in one dramatic leap, but through countless small, deliberate choices.
The sky didn’t erase my past — it expanded it.
And each time I take off, I’m reminded:
the sky doesn’t reward perfection.
It rewards persistence.