CECILIA ARAGON
Cecilia became the first Latina pilot to secure a place on the United States Unlimited Aerobatic Team and earn the right to represent her country at the Olympics of aviation, the World Aerobatic Championships. How did she do it?
Dr. Cecilia Aragon is an award-winning author, airshow pilot, and the first Latina full professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. She holds the ATP and CFI licenses and has accumulated over 5,000 flight hours. She’s worked with Nobel Prize winners, taught astronauts to fly, and created musical simulations of the universe with rock stars. Her major awards for research, and a stint at NASA designing software for Mars missions, led President Obama to call her “one of the top scientists and engineers in the country.”
Her new memoir, Flying Free (2020), debuted on five bestseller lists and is a TODAY Show and Ms. Magazine Recommended Read. In Flying Free, Cecilia brings to life her exhilarating and inspiring journey from shy, fearful daughter of immigrants to champion pilot for the US Aerobatic Team.
The daughter of a Chilean father and a Filipina mother, Cecilia grew up as a shy, timid child in a small Midwestern town during the 1960s, beset by strong fears of heights of any kind. Targeted by school bullies and dismissed by many of her teachers, she worried that people would find out the truth: that she was INTF. Incompetent. Nerd. Terrified. Failure.
This feeling stayed with her well into her twenties when she was told that “girls can’t do science” or “women just don’t know how to handle machines.”
Yet in the span of just six years, Cecilia became the first Latina pilot to secure a place on the United States Unlimited Aerobatic Team and earn the right to represent her country at the Olympics of aviation, the World Aerobatic Championships. How did she do it?
Using mathematical techniques to overcome her fear, Cecilia performed at air shows in front of millions of people. She jumped out of airplanes and taught others how to fly. She learned how to fund-raise and earn money to compete at the world level. She worked as a test pilot and contributed to the design of experimental airplanes, crafting curves of metal and fabric that shaped air to lift inanimate objects high above the earth.
And best of all, she surprised everyone by overcoming the prejudices people held about her because of her race and her gender.
Flying Free is the story of how Cecilia Aragon broke free from expectations and rose above her own limits by combining math and logic with her passion for flying in unexpected ways. You don’t have to be a math whiz or a science geek to learn from her story. You just have to want to soar.
Cecilia has been writing stories since she was four years old. She knew she wanted to be a writer from a fairly early age, but some of the events detailed in her memoir—including early discouragement from teachers who doubted a Latina daughter of immigrants could write good English—led her to put writing on the back burner. It wasn’t until 2014 that she returned to writing more seriously. She entered a formal creative writing program, and earned her MFA in writing for children at Hamline University in 2019. Shortly after graduating, she found her agent. She sold her manuscript within a week, garnering four offers from publishers. She chose Blackstone, even though they weren’t the largest, because she felt they believed in her story the most. The memoir was released in September 2020 and went on to hit multiple bestseller lists.
Currently, she’s in the final revision stage of a middle grade autobiographical novel, and she also has a picture book version of her memoir in the works.
Today, Cecilia Aragon is a professor at the University of Washington. She instructs aerobatics part-time. Learn more at CeciliaAragonAuthor.com or linktr.ee/CeciliaAragon