UPS pilot paves way for other Black female pilots - NewsNation
Angel Hughes has always had her eyes on the skies.As a young girl growing up in Newark, New Jersey, Hughes, a retired U.S. Coast Guard pilot, would always see commercial airline pilots when she traveled.
“So that was kind of the goal as a little girl,” she said.
As she traveled, though, she noticed little girls like her didn’t have much representation in the industry.
“I’d never seen a young Black female pilot in uniform, flying jumbo jets doing exactly what I wanted to do,” Hughes, now a pilot for UPS, said.
UPS, one of the world’s largest cargo carriers, still has less than 200 female pilots— that’s nearly 6% of its pilot base. And in the United States, less than 1% of all certified pilots across the aviation industry are Black women.