“In all these years, nothing has reached easy to me,” says Zoya Agarwal
I am honored to even just by writing about her. She is such a sport that people might not even expect to be. Her works are so inspirational that words won’t be enough for it to express.
Meet Captain Zoya Agarwal, an Indian Commercial Pilot that has flown for Air India.
Zoya’s Journey
After topping her college graduation, she was determined for her path and therefore asked her father to permit her to follow her childhood dream of becoming a pilot. Even while the packed schedule of three years of graduation, she used her spare time running after her college hours for aviation courses in different parts of her city.” Her father Hesitantly acquiesced to take a loan to pay for my practice. I put my heart and soul into it and excelled,” she says.
Even though she had to wait for about two years for the job opportunity and then came a chance in the form of Air India’s vacancy for seven aviators, Ms. Agarwal contested against 3,000 others. She drove to arise with an offer letter in hand. The journey was full of hard work & struggles; she also remembers that her father had a heart attack four days before her interview round. Zoya reluctantly agreed to locomote to Mumbai and take her exam at his behest. “There, she cleared all the rounds and entered Air India as a First Officer! In 2004, As she flew my first flight to Dubai, she said, “I’d finally touched the stars!”
After that, there was no pivoting back course from the pilot. She paid off her father’s loans and purchased diamond earrings for her mother.
Zoya’s Inspirational Stories
She was 1st Woman Commander to pilot Air India’s first Boeing 777 aircraft over the Hindu Kush mountain range.
As a preventive extent during the COVID-19 pandemic times, the Government of India prompted Vande Bharat Mission in May 2020 to vacate approximately 14,800 Indians from twelve different countries on sixty-four Air India aviation. Agarwal got this golden opportunity & was chosen to co-pilot the initial repatriation flying by the airline.
She strives to inspire young girls and youth by encouraging them on various fora as the fate of this world to be the transformation-developers of tomorrow!
She enunciates: “My mission is to encourage anyone who confronts self-doubts to stretch their wings and make their dreams a living reality!
In 2021, Agarwal commanded an all-woman crew making the inaugural flight from San Francisco to Bengaluru a colossal triumph. She evolved as the 1st Woman Commander to fly over the North pole on one of the world’s lengthiest air routes in 2021.
The United Nations picked Agarwal as its representative spokesperson for Generation Equality in late 2021. Her life story is exponentially motivating flight.
