Tweet This
Cara King has worked as both a pilot and on the business side of the male-dominated aviation... [+]
Think about it: when was the last time you were on a plane and heard a female pilot’s voice? It’s a sad fact, but it's a rarity to find women in the aviation industry. The Air Line Pilots Association, which represents pilots at major and regional carriers in the United States and Canada, says that women make up just 5% of its 53,000 members.
Globally, it’s even worse — only 4,000 of the 130,000 airline pilots are women, according to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots.
And it’s not much better for women in the executive ranks of aviation. “It’s a boys’ game,” Marcia Ferranto, chief executive of WTS International, an advocacy group for women in transportation, told the Boston Globe.
But those statistics didn’t let Cara King hold her back from becoming an aviatrix and seeking a high-flying career that has taken her from the cockpit to the business side of the industry. King is an aviation sales adviser with XOJET — an on-demand private jet charter company that is revolutionizing the way people fly privately — a pilot and a skydiver.
King, skydiving with her husband Cameron. Courtesy of Cara King.
“After graduating high school, I got accepted to a couple good colleges and decided not to go to any of them,” King says. “I sat down with my parents in tears and said, ‘I don’t even know what I want to do. I don’t want to waste your money. I don’t want to go to college, I want to travel.’”
At some point during those travels, a friend asked King to go skydiving in Florida — and she got hooked. But a year after becoming a licensed skydiving instructor, she realized it wouldn’t work as a long-term career plan. And that’s when the lightbulb went off: Aviation was the answer.
“I was jumping at airports, around all kinds of airplanes taxiing and private jets landing,” King says. “So, I broadened my view, and I thought, ‘There’s something going on here, and I want to be part of it.’”
She started out at a small commuter airline in Boston, throwing bags in the back of planes, taking tickets, and doing anything she could to get experience. One day she had an even bigger aha moment: “A female pilot got off a plane, and that was the moment where I said, ‘Holy smoke, I could be a pilot.’ And that’s my story. It started from not going to college, bumming around, jumping out of planes, and then meeting this pilot and thinking, ‘That’s what I’m gonna do.’”
King started saving all her money to take flying lessons. “Within seven months or so, I had my private pilot’s license. Which gets you absolutely nothing. You have basically no qualifications except you can fly a little tiny airplane yourself. So that’s where the hard work really begins.”
Flying a Cessna. Courtesy of Cara King.
Fast forward a couple years of hard training and lots of practice behind the controls of skydiving planes, and King snagged a job with NetJets, a company that has helped democratize private aviation by allowing passengers to buy shares in aircrafts. She worked her way up to captain: “I felt like I had truly accomplished my goals once I could say I was a captain in a jet. That was the pinnacle.”
As she flew back and forth across the country, King encountered some hilarious moments. “I can’t tell you how many times folks would get on the plane and I’d be standing at the top of the steps to greet them, and they would immediately assume I was the flight attendant,” King recalls. “They’d start saying, ‘I’ll have a Bloody Mary, I’ll have a mimosa, where’s the coffee.’ I would just laugh and say, ‘No problem.’”
King loved watching their stunned reactions when she climbed into the cockpit: “To me, that’s the fun stuff of being in aviation — the surprise factor.”
Three years ago, King joined XOJET, where she found a mentor in the company’s CMO, Shari Jones, a visionary leader who is also a rarity in the upper ranks of aviation. “She has been an influence on me — I’ve really enjoyed seeing a woman in an executive role. She’s a badass. She came from fashion. Now she’s in aviation holding her ground and making XOJET what it is.”
In King’s current role, she is responsible for generating new business and finding new clients. She also manages flights for her clients, picks the right airport, and chooses the airplane that will make sense for the runways and the locations. “That’s where all my pilot experience and knowledge comes into play,” she says.
One of King's most memorable skydiving experiences was above Atlantic City. Courtesy of Cara King.
In her free time, she continues to rent planes and fly them for fun. And King hasn’t stopped skydiving, either. She estimates that she has made more than 4,000 jumps — including a daredevil spectacle to celebrate the 30th anniversary of an Atlantic City casino.
She’s also a mentor to other up-and-coming jumpers and is part of a women’s skydiving group called Sisters in Skydiving. “I like supporting other women coming up in the sport because skydiving is just like aviation — it’s almost all men with even worse egos than pilots,” she says.
Looking back, King says it was no coincidence that she chose a career in aviation: “As a child, I would climb trees and just sit up there and read a book and listen to the leaves rustle and feel the breeze in my face.”
King says her self-confidence is what has propelled her. “Going to a job interview, I always believed in myself,” she says. “I think that confidence really creates your own reality.”
Her advice for other young women starting out in aviation? “Be the most excellent pilot because there will be those men that doubt you. It’s sad, but some people still think women are not as good or talented or as qualified as men at certain roles,” she says. “Show them you got it.”
