Monroe Regional Airport has had the pleasure of employing some incredible people. One such person is Lakeysha Bullock, a female African American Private pilot from Winnsboro, Louisiana. Even though Lakeysha doesn’t work here at this time, she volunteers for school field trips and encourages young minds to consider aviation as a career choice. Of course having her simulator is a plus! These reasons and more are the reason we decided to interview her for this article during Black History Month.
Lakeysha got into aviation at the age of nineteen when she was hired at DFW airport. For the first week, she worked cleaning planes, but after that, she worked in the tower. She went on to say that it was her first time in the aviation industry and seeing things as a whole.
When learning anything the first time, there are always going to be aspects of the skill that are more difficult than others, and it is no different when it comes to piloting a plane. One of the biggest challenges for Lakeysha was landing. “Landing is a part of the critical phase of flight; it takes so much focus and coordination”, she says. “At that level, you have to be in tune with the plane because anything can happen.” She continued.
Her background was a challenge for Lakeysha. While many of her peers in flight school had parents that were either former military or former pilots and had grown up knowing a bit more about aviation than she, as her parents were in the oil and medical field. In order to overcome these challenges, she sought out people and organizations with similar backgrounds who had been through the same journey to give her advice as she continued along her journey.
Lakeysha began working towards her pilot license at the age of 29.
She accomplished this goal in 4 months. She went on to say that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires forty hours, but the flight school that she attended required eighty hours. This was done to prepare the students for commercial flying.
Often achieving great things is rarely easy, and the hardships and challenges oftentimes build character and teach us lessons that we carry with us for the rest of our lives. The challenges Lakeysha faced was no different. She always sought to surround herself with people who had qualities valuable to to the colloquial expression, “iron sharpens iron.” Having children has changed her perspective as well, one of the things she wants to teach her boys is that no matter what you want, with enough hard work, you can achieve it.
Lakeysha is a testament to if you want something, and are willing to work hard at it nothing is unattainable. Her story is just one of many stories that proves those who work hard can achieve what they set out to do, and we are proud to have had an “Overcomer” such as Lakeysha Bullock a part of the Monroe Regional Airport Family.