After 35 Years, Yasmin Abdi Farah Takes Flight as Somalia’s First Female Captain

Somalia’s Skies Welcome a New Captain — and a Revival of Possibility

At dawn in Mogadishu, when the ocean breeze carries the call to prayer over the runway and the heat hasn’t yet settled on the tarmac, a young captain strides toward her aircraft with the calm of routine and the knowledge that nothing about this is ordinary. Headset in hand, checklist tucked under her arm, Captain Yasmin Abdi Farah powers up the cockpit of a Maandeeq Air jet bound for Nairobi. A familiar route, yes—but the story it tells is new.

Yasmin, just 27, is the first Somali woman to take the captain’s seat in 35 years, a generational bridge built over conflict, migration, and the long quiet of a grounded dream. Commissioned in 2022, she flies for Maandeeq Air on routes linking Mogadishu with Nairobi and cities across Somalia. Earlier this year, she was named Somalia’s Pilot of the Year 2025, a nod to skill—and to symbolism.

A legacy reclaimed

For much of the past three decades, the name that hovered over any mention of Somali women in aviation was that of Captain Asli Hassan Abade, the country’s first female pilot and an emblem of what was once possible. After war tore through the country in the early 1990s, Asli’s story began to live more in folklore than in airports. Then came Yasmin—commissioned on the same runway where Asli once took off—returning the narrative to the present tense.

“It proves that women belong in the captain’s seat. Every time I take the controls of an aircraft, I carry more than passengers, I carry the hopes of young girls who dare to dream,” she says. The line has been shared widely on Somali social media, a testament to how long people have waited for this moment and how much it resonates across borders.

From Wajir to the captain’s seat

Born in Kenya’s Wajir County to Somali parents, Yasmin grew up on stories of pioneers and journeys. Wajir—known to many travelers for years as a compulsory stopover, when security rules routed flights between Somalia and Kenya through the small town’s airport—was a constant reminder that in this region, even the sky comes with a backstory. She set her sights on aviation early and pursued it quietly, moving through the years of math, endurance, simulators, and stick time that forge a pilot.

Her rise has a transnational feel that mirrors the Somali experience itself. Diaspora families cross continents; young professionals move between Nairobi, Mogadishu, Hargeisa, and Dubai; careers trace flight paths that didn’t exist a generation ago. In that sense, her captain’s bars also represent a reknitting of a fragmented social fabric—making the exceptional feel increasingly normal.

What one pilot means for many girls

In a country where women’s names are often attached to poetry and entrepreneurship rather than flight manifests, Yasmin’s presence on a flight deck offers more than inspiration; it offers proof. Anecdotally, aviation schools across East Africa say inquiries from young women spike every time a photo circulates of a female crew in uniform. It’s not unique to Somalia. Around the world, roughly 5 percent of airline pilots are women, according to industry bodies. In Africa, the figure hovers in the same range, though the profile has risen: Ethiopian Airlines made headlines with all-female flight crews, and Kenya’s Captain Irene Koki Mutungi has flown the Dreamliner as one of the first African women to do so.

Visibility matters. It turns ambition into a map. If you’re a girl watching the arrivals board at Aden Adde International Airport, seeing Yasmin walk through the gate in epaulets says: the path is real; someone has taken it; here’s how it looks.

Somalia’s aviation reboot

That this story is unfolding now is itself a sign of change. After years of conflict, Somalia has steadily reclaimed parts of its aviation ecosystem. In 2022, the country regained control of its airspace management after decades of oversight from abroad, a bureaucratic milestone with outsized symbolic weight. Domestic carriers have multiplied. Diaspora travel is steadier. Routes that were once patchy are now threaded across the map: Bosaso to Mogadishu, Kismayo to Hargeisa, Mogadishu to Nairobi—sometimes via Wajir, often direct.

Every new flight is a small wager on normal life. It means mechanics employed, schedules to keep, paperwork to file, safety checks to pass. For a profession that depends on regulatory discipline, the return of routine in Somali aviation is its own quiet triumph. It also expands the runway for talent—men and women—to train, qualify, and stay.

The weight of memory—and a wider lens

When Yasmin throttles up on takeoff, she carries more than passengers and fuel. There’s the memory of years when flying out of Mogadishu meant risk calculations and flight bans. There’s the reality of a region still shaped by fragile politics, even as it pushes toward new economic horizons. And there’s a global conversation unfolding about who gets to lead complex, high-trust professions: pilots, surgeons, engineers, coders.

Consider the pattern. Across Africa, women are moving into spaces once considered off-limits, from cockpits to corner offices. Rwanda’s Yvonne Makolo chairs the International Air Transport Association. Senegal and Nigeria have raised profiles of women in air traffic control and aerospace engineering. The path is not even; it rarely is. But the direction of travel is unmistakable.

In this context, Yasmin’s award as Somalia’s Pilot of the Year 2025 is more than a plaque. It’s a signal of institutional acceptance—a public statement that merit and example should be rewarded, and that role models belong not just in history books but in today’s logbooks.

What will it take to keep the altitude?

The next step isn’t just celebrating firsts. It’s building the pipeline: scholarships for aviation academies, partnerships with regional carriers, mentorship networks, science clubs that nudge teenagers toward physics and aerodynamics. It means airports with better lighting and safer access roads so families feel at ease sending daughters to late training shifts. It means regulators that keep up with ICAO standards and employers that measure talent by hours flown and checkride performance, not by gender.

And it means telling stories that are honest about complexity but generous with hope. Somalia’s airspace has seen military flights, humanitarian airlifts, and long stretches of silence. Now, increasingly, it sees families reuniting, traders closing deals, students heading to exams, and a young woman in a captain’s chair, setting a heading for Nairobi as the sun lights the wing.

Feature stories like Yasmin’s can become clichés if we let them. But they can also be north stars. If you look up on a clear morning over Mogadishu and catch a Maandeeq Air jet banking south, you might wonder who is in the cockpit. You might think of the girls at the fence line, phones out, faces upturned. You might ask what kind of country lets them see themselves in that silhouette and decide: I could do that. And then, crucially, make room for them to try.

For now, the checklist is complete, the runway is clear, and the wheels are rolling. Somalia’s skies are no longer a memory. They’re a horizon.

By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.