Thirty-year-old Iram Habib has become the first Kashmiri Muslim woman to become a pilot. She will join GoAir next month. Iram succeeds Tanvi Raina, a Kashmiri Pandit, who joined Air India as the Valley’s first woman pilot in 2016. In April last year, 21-year-old Ayesha Aziz, also from Kashmir, became India’s youngest student pilot.
Iram’s road to becoming a pilot was never easy, especially since it passed through the conservative Kashmiri Muslim society. Her father is a supplier of surgical equipment to government hospitals in Kashmir. In her pursuit, Iram even gave up her dream of achieving a doctorate in forestry to give wings to her childhood ambition.
After taking her bachelor’s degree in forestry from Dehradun and post-graduation from Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology in Srinagar, she joined a flight school in the US and completed her training in 2016. Iram, who is now taking classes in Delhi to get a commercial pilot licence, said that she completed her training from Miami in the US in 2016. Iram said she had logged “260 hours of flying” at the US and secured a commercial pilot’s licence for the US and Canada. “Everyone was surprised to find that I am a Kashmiri Muslim doing flying but I went ahead to achieve my goal,” she said.
Incidentally, more than 50 Kashmiri Muslim women have taken up jobs as crew members in several domestic and international airlines in the past three years.
