THE Arabian Section of the Ninety-Nines 

“I have wanted to fly since I was a child. Never having experienced the feeling of flying before I got it into my mind that I have to attend a 15 minute try to fly on my dad's birthday, so my parents had to get up in the wee hours and drive for hours to fulfill their little girl's dreams. Surely enough, after that I was convinced I had to get back into the air!

It took a job as a software developer though before I ended up in aviation professionally. At the age of 20 I had enough savings to take up flying lessons. I joined a young business aviation company in Austria as a Flight Dispatcher after obtaining my PPL. There I worked my way up - Head of Dispatch and Postholder Ground Ops - while continuing with training for CPL, IFR, MCC, and frozen ATPL. After more than 6 years and countless applications I got lucky. The owner of a Learjet 60 based in Moscow accepted me as co-pilot. A job which would only last for a couple of months. Thereafter I was based in Moscow, Dubai, Riyadh, and Luxembourg for several companies, always meeting the fate of being laid off due to operator and aircraft changes.

In December 2015 I landed a job in Bahrain as the first female pilot with a company which is part of a joint venture with my first employer in aviation - back to the roots, Head of Dispatch again, followed by Captain upgrade in 2017.

Due to my career I'm privileged to see places I would have otherwise never seen, meet interesting people and cultures, and enjoy different challenges on every flying day. Whenever I'm back in Austria I still love to work the radio as operations manager at the local airfield where my aviation roots are. I hope that one day I will have the opportunity to go on a little adventure holiday with a SEP aircraft again, like in 2007 when I brought an aircraft from said airfield to the Ukraine for the first time.”