10 minutes with local taste makers

Allison Strydom

Mere seconds after hopping onto a video call with Allison, an airplane zooms over my building. The hum of its engine and propellers drowns out our conversation, but this time it isn’t the regular nuisance of working across from an airport. It is serendipitous, because I am chatting to a pilot – with a cat on her lap and a bedroom filled with plants in the background.

“Everyone calls me Ally”, says the 22-year-old private pilot who is on the fast track to completing her commercial license. Her love for the sky has inspired a hefty 30K people to tap the follow button and tag along as Ally becomes airborne. I for one am loving the ride! With incredible consistency she takes her followers (or are we passengers?) through the rigmarole of life in the air and the airport of scenic Swakopmund. Tapping into an unassuming avenue of sharing aviation with us groundspeople, Ally films almost every element. From pulling the planes out of the hangar and completing all the necessary checks and measures, to taking us up into the air, all beautifully composed in reels I find myself watching on repeat.

Her love for flying isn’t simply a means to an end. It is in her genes. Ally’s late father was a pilot, who, since she was little, was determined to teach her how to land a plane. The bug bit after her first time in the cockpit and she has not looked back since. She reminisces over the times she took to the sky with her dad when I ask about the legacy she is destined to carry. But Ally is by no means living in his shadow – she is paving her own runway. I like to think they are co-pilots up there in the air.

I ask her about that defining moment, when she knew she would become a pilot. Without hesitation Ally recalls her first time flying a Cessna 206. With a six-seat passenger capacity the plane had her “feeling like a proper pilot.”

When Ally isn’t in the air (which is seldom), she is at the airport. And when she isn’t at the airport she is either baking sweet treats for her family or diving into psychology books. Even her hobbies are disciplined, testament to the fact that Ally has her eyes firmly on the horizon everytime she takes flight.

I have always regarded aviation as a male dominated industry. On the rare occasion that a female voice echoed through the corridors of an airplane, I would get goosebumps imagining my own potential in stereotypical male professions. Chatting to Ally is no exception. But the plane game has evolved to include more women, she assures me, adding that her class of future commercial pilots is predominantly female. Her advice to girls hoping to call flying a career: Ignore the naysayers and keep going. Being a flight attendant is a noble profession, no doubt, but rest assured there is space for women in the cockpit, too.

Ally says she anticipates the day when all the wonder of soaring high above the Skeleton Coast becomes mundane. Yet, after three years of flying, “the water is a different blue every day.” Every time she is in the air Ally has a pinch me moment and considers herself incredibly lucky to call the flight-deck her office. And how lucky she is to do the very thing so many of us regard as the ultimate superpower. You can take the girl out of the sky, but as her Instagram bio @allisxn_ says: “You can’t take the sky from me.”

Charene Labuschagne