This review was originally published on https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com.

Like so many others bitten by the flying bug, Cecilia Aragon became obsessed with learning to pilot a plane after her first flight in a single-engine aircraft. She spent every spare hour at the airport, and all she wanted to talk about was flying, even with her disinterested spouse and friends.

This is where any similarity between Aragon and other private pilots ends. In Aragon’s remarkable memoir, Flying Free: My Victory Over Fear to Become the First Latina Pilot on the US Aerobatic Team, the author describes her journey from a shy, awkward, and fearful girl to an almost preternaturally talented aerobatic pilot.

The daughter of a Chilean physicist father and Filipina mother, Aragon shone academically but suffered outside the classroom as a result of her “foreign” appearance. Tormented and physically attacked by bullies at her school in small-town Indiana, where her father taught at Purdue University, she was too afraid to share the extent of the abuse with her parents.

She learned at home that girls should be helpful, putting others’ needs before their own. Going after what she wanted was selfish. Out in the world, she saw that being smart made her peers mad, that she was different from those around her, and she couldn’t count on grownups to be supportive.

When her coworker at a software company in Silicon Valley offered Aragon a ride in his small plane, she uncharacteristically accepted. Although it frightened her terribly, the appeal of flying was powerful and immediate. “The hole in my heart was filled,” she writes of that first flight.

This was the 1980s, and flying airplanes was largely the province of wealthy, white men. Aragon, in her early twenties and making an entry-level salary in programming, immediately found an instructor and arranged her life around flying. She spent all of her disposable income on lessons, working in flying time before and after work and on weekends.

After quickly acquiring her private license, instrument rating, and commercial rating, she tried a lesson in aerobatics, thinking it would give her a better physical connection to the airplane. Although she needed to return to the ground quickly to avoid throwing up, Aragon knew that she had found an even more pure form of joy in aerobatic flying.

Aragon writes with endearing honesty, humility, and vivid detail in recalling her intense fear and sense of inferiority as she learned to fly. “I was terrified of operating machinery. Even driving a car scared me.”

Aragon’s ace up her sleeve was her mathematical skill. Not only was her sharp mind highly trained in math, but doing the calculations soothed her fears, giving her the confidence to tackle each challenge. And challenges abounded in Aragon’s path to aerobatic triumph, from the economic burden of owning an aircraft to the challenges of flying a plane built for a man’s body.

Despite her obvious talent as she progressed in aerobatics, Aragon never fully shed her fear. In a process she calls induction, she worked through the trickiest, riskiest maneuvers step by step, calculation by calculation, until she was confident she could do them. In the air, she channeled her fear into excitement, which came across in her performances.

Aragon effectively brings readers into the cramped cockpit with her as she clamped her double seat belts down painfully across her legs, as she yanked the stick with all her might to make a sharp turn, and when she hovered, completely vertical, waiting for her plane to flop over and begin its nose dive.

Through flying, Aragon finally felt the freedom and power she missed growing up as a minority in a mostly white community, and as a daughter of immigrants with traditional mindsets about gender roles. Slowly, she also found an accepting community among her fellow pilots—primarily older white men.

This diminutive, timid pilot who needed to attach scuba weights to her seat and wear elevator shoes to even qualify to fly her first aerobatic plane, shines in Flying Free as a formidable force. Cecilia Aragon is no less than a thrilling inspiration to anyone who wants to accomplish something that frightens them or who has been discouraged from trying.

Aragon credits flying with opening her world and giving her the confidence to realize her potential. Flying allowed her to change her lifelong mentality of “it’s not safe. I don’t belong. I’m not that kind of person.” A quick look at her biography suggests that she ran with it. Aerobatic flying is practically a footnote in her larger career as an eminent computer scientist.

Knowing the impressive trajectory of Aragon’s life after she conquered aerobatic flying, it’s powerful to think what might not have been had Aragon not climbed into that four-seat Piper as a young woman. Conversely, it suggests what great fortune it is to discover one’s passion. Like jet fuel to an airplane, Aragon shows how passion is the ingredient that powers people to action, allowing them to reach great heights.

I am aware of Cecilia Aragon's inspiring life story through a profile featured in Science Careers. I was eager to read the book length version. But her childhood is full of difficulties, which is hardly a grouse. The manner in which the facts are presented makes it a difficult read. I am aware that she breaks free but I am not motivated to continue reading the story. The Disneyeque progression of the story, the scenes of her soaring above it all and fulfilling her destiny would make for good reading, but I did not feel inspired enough to stay with it.

"Air was the element I was born to live in.
My wings trembled in the air currents like they'd grown out of the muscles in my back. This plane was my body. My body gleamed in the sun, a tiny bright being free of the confines of the world."

This is the kind of stuff I crave for. An amazing female role model (A programmer, a nerdy computer scientist, an aerobatic pilot that won championships and university professor!) that I can look up to, the life of a successful aviatrix tingling my flying bones and helping me achieve my best, defying all odds in a man-oriented sector.
"Don't ever get too good at a traditionally female task or they'll make you do it for the rest of your life," is one of the most relatable sentences of this amazing memoir.
Flying is the passion that set free Cecilia Aragon and my heart filled with joy and excitement all through this book. I loved every single page, the rites of passages she accounted were excruciatingly hard and painful that lead to a life of fulfillment.
Flying is cheating death every day and for women to go down that road, especially if they are grown in a traditional atmosphere is especially difficult. The environment and society prepare you for the roles you will lead and deviating from this road requires courage and determination to eliminate obstacles along the way.
The price you pay is worth it, though and I agree with every word of her description of flying: "It was a three-dimensional dance in the sky, art plus mathematics, science plus sport, requiring all reflexes, rhythm, and timing."
A must-read for aviation enthusiasts, female aviators and all women struggling to achieve the best of themselves. This book will definitely boost your spirits and as Aragon says: "Life is relentless, and if you allow yourself to be fully alive, you too will become a force of nature."

"I've heard people describe how alcohol or heroin seems to fill the hole in their heart, how it wipes all the pain away. That's the effect flying had on me.
For so long, I've been aching, lonely, missing something essential. Flitting from one failure to another. But that day, the hole in my heart was filled."

I really loved this book. It was such a fascinating tale of an extraordinary person. I did like how it focused on her specific journey in time. But the intro introduced so many other facets that I would love to read more from this author. I really related to her background and growing up shy and scared. Reading about someone who overcomes such obstacles and writes about them with such honesty and how they still affect her was so refreshing. This book definitely left me feeling inspired

The subtitle of this book says it all - My Victory over Fear to Become the First Latina Pilot on the US Aerobatic Team. This empowering memoir shines a light on numerous obstacles that Cecelia Aragon faced throughout her life, and how she overcame them, and is still doing so today.

Cecelia Aragon is a daughter of immigrants that grew up in Indiana. She was smart, enjoyed math, and was often bullied and felt out of place. Fast forward to her early adulthood, a fellow co-worker offered to take her up for a ride in his plane. It terrified her but then it changed her life. She oscillated back and forth between confidence and insecurity as she learned to fly and then mastered aerobatics of flight. A well told story that often uses math references to relate to life and flying. After reading this book you’ll feel that anything is possible.
#netgalley #flyingfree