Pilots: You can’t keep a good woman down

Her parents told her no when O’Dea’s high school added an aviation ground school and she eagerly shared her plans to sign up for it. “They looked at me like I was crazy,” said O’Dea. “They explained that as a girl, I could be a nurse, a teacher, a wife, or a hairdresser. Those were all my options in the late 1970s and I didn’t think to question it.”

Dutifully, she attended cosmetology school and got married at age 21. She became a successful hairdresser, then opened her own business in the San Francisco Bay area. Many times, she told her husband she wanted to take flying lessons—but he, too, told her no. “Later,” he’d say. They needed to save money to build her business, he told her. Then they needed money to launch his company. They needed to save to buy a house.

“Later” became a year, then five years, then 10.

O’Dea acquiesced to his decisions until the marriage ended when she was 35. “There I was, trying to manage a business and a divorce, and come to terms with the fact that I would probably never have children. But I thought: What I can do is take flying lessons.” So she did.

Now, more than three decades after asking to take ground school, O’Dea isn’t asking anyone’s permission to fly. She is a full-time flight instructor who wakes up every day eager to share her love of piloting with her many students. Last year, after 27 years as a salon owner, she closed her doors in order to devote herself entirely to instructing. She hasn’t regretted it for one day.

That’s not to say the path was easy. O’Dea juggled flying lessons with working full time as a hair stylist, running a business, and learning to live on her own for the first time in her life. Slowly, over six years, she built hours and added ratings. “I just chipped away at it,” she said. “Every time I took off, I left behind all the feelings of sadness, loneliness, and stress pulling me down. Like the poem says, I escaped the surly bonds of the Earth.”

In her late 30s, she began to think about flying professionally, but worried it was too late. Could she really start over in a new career at this point in life? She put the question to her flight instructor, expecting another no like the many she’d received before. Instead, he took O’Dea to a corporate hangar and told her he wanted to introduce her to someone. “In came a woman in a flight uniform,” remembered O’Dea. “She told me she learned to fly at age 30 and now, at age 42, she was the chief pilot for a major corporation. So I knew I could do it, too.”

O’Dea started picking up part-time flying jobs and cutting back on her days at the salon. She discovered a knack for instructing—a natural outlet for her ability to work with many personality types and her positivity and patience. Her student numbers grew and her hours at the salon shrank until she was cutting hair just one day a week and even then wishing she was flying. In February 2017, she locked her salon doors and began instructing full time.

O’Dea is now 53 and says that while it can be tempting to regret not starting her flying career earlier, she doesn’t allow herself to brood on it. She is only grateful she achieved her life’s dream and has the opportunity every day to help others achieve theirs.

“Flight training gave me the empowerment and greatest sense of confidence and accomplishment in something I was doing on my very own,” she raved in a Facebook post earlier this year. “I never looked back and I never looked down. I am in control, navigating as the captain of my life.”