Asnath Mahapa was just a little girl, growing up in a dusty village in Limpopo, when she looked up to see an airplane thundering through the sky. She was awestruck.

Someone is in charge of that giant machine, she thought. And then: “I want to be that person.”

The dream stayed with her throughout her school days. After completing matric, she told her father that she wanted to study to be a pilot.

Impossible, he told her. He had never even been on a plane. To him, flying was a dangerous fantasy; to her, it was destiny.

They struck a compromise. She would complete a year of electrical engineering at university, and if that didn't work out, she could aim to get her wings.

By the end of that year, she had her answer. Engineering bored her to tears. Flying was the only thing she had ever wanted to do.

Money was a big obstacle. Aviation training was staggeringly expensive. But when her father discovered that the funds her late mother had left could be released for education, the doors opened.

At last, she could take her place in a cockpit.

On her first day at flight school in Polokwane, in 1998, Asnath walked into a room full of white men. The only other woman was the receptionist.

The new student, not even out of her teens, felt isolated and out of place. But her debut flight with her instructor was a liberation. In the sky, Asnath was at home.

A gruelling bout of airsickness brought her down to earth with a jolt, and she worried that her career would be over before it had even begun.

Her instructor was gentle. “It happens,” he assured her. “You get sick. This too shall pass.” And it did.

Just over a year later, Asnath earned her commercial pilot’s licence. She flew for the South African Air Force, the United Nations, and the Red Cross, before joining South African Airways as an Airbus pilot.

But even as she proved her prowess above the clouds, she had to steel herself against the headwinds of hardened attitudes. Aviation, with its elite structures and old boys’ clubs, was slow to change.

In the cockpit, she faced icy silence from some captains. They would greet her curtly, and fly an entire leg without a word beyond the required call-outs.

Only after she landed smoothly, managing traffic and turbulence with steady hands, would the atmosphere thaw. Time and again, Asnath had to demonstrate her competence before being treated as an equal.

As the first black woman pilot in South Africa, the weight of history and expectation lay heavily on her shoulders.

“There's nothing wrong with your flying,” an older mentor told her. “It's the men you want to sit next to who are having an issue with you.”

For years, Asnath lived in fear that a single mistake would cost her career. To survive, she wore a mask of professionalism, calm, strict, and unflinching, even as she battled self-doubt inside.

Her resilience and determination were forged long before she took to the skies. The daughter of two teachers, she grew up in a village without running water or electricity.

Her mother, vice-rector of a teachers’ college, died when Asnath was just 13. The loss was devastating, but it gave her resolve.

“I had to stand on my own two feet,” she recalls. “I told myself, I must become something.”

That resolve carried Asnath through the turbulence of her early career. Crossing oceans, at the helm of a machine worth billions, she felt only gratitude and humility.

The battles she fought left their mark, but they also gave her a mission. “It was my responsibility to kick all the doors open,” she says.

She founded the African College of Aviation to train the next generation, particularly young women, so they would not have to stand alone as she once did.

Today, as a Senior First Officer on the Airbus 340, Asnath has become the person she once looked up to, a trailblazer through the clouds, a role model for anyone who has ever turned their gaze to the sky and dared to dream.