Into the Wild Blue: Four Women Studying in Ukrainian Aviation

Ukrainian women have a better chance to fly airplanes and pursue careers in the traditionally male-dominated aviation field since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but females are still heavily in the minority, four aviation university students told Kyiv Post in recent interviews.

The Kyiv Aviation Institute (KAI) students interviewed by Kyiv Post said that they are still outnumbered nine or ten to one by male students in their classes, but, they said, the Soviet tradition that aircraft and flight are pure, manly pursuits is in the past, provided a female student does her fair share of the work and knows her subject.

Valeriia Boiko

Boiko is a third-year student and former “wanna-be” pilot studying Aircraft Flight Operations in the KAI Aerospace faculty. Her path to reach the air at the controls of a powered aircraft has been more complicated than for many flight school students in most places, because in Ukraine, the Russian Air Force targets civilian aircraft, the people inside, and the ground facilities on which the aircraft are based with missiles, bombs, and drones.

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Thanks to funding by Czech taxpayers, KAI partners with a Czech flight academy called F AIR , so that Ukrainian flight operations students can log flight hours and obtain a basic civilian license in airspace not under attack by the Russian Air Force.

Boiko, in a video interview minutes before a day’s training flight (aboard a Reims-Cessna F150G), said that the man-to-woman ratio is about the same in Czech flight school as it is at KAI, about ten to one. But, if in Ukraine a female budding pilot is seen outside of aviation as a remarkable or peculiar person, in Europe her fellow students’ and instructors’ attitude is that there are neither boy nor girl pilots, just pilots, she said.

Boiko said that she hopes to eventually become a civilian pilot of multi-engine aircraft, and that she would be just as happy flying for a Ukrainian airline as for an international airline. That further education is expensive and the money to pay for it would need to be found, but the first step is completing flight school on single engines, she said.

The best part about flying is the feeling of freedom and total control of where you go and how you get there, Boiko said.

Valeriya Antonova

Antonova, 18, chose an aviation and pilot-prep education on her own, she said, without the direct influence of her father, a long-time professional pilot of Ukrainian heavy transport aircraft. The chance to travel and see the world from the sky was important in her decision, and she is good at technical subjects, and that’s mostly why she’s trying to become a pilot, she said.

“My father never pushed me to become a pilot. All he and my mother told me was that I should choose something that makes me happy,” she said.

Now in her second year, Antonova “flies” in a KAI simulator regularly and takes a full load of technical classes, and from what she can see, there isn’t any difference between men and women when it comes to learning how to fly an airplane. She said none of the curriculum is overwhelming, but much of it is painstaking. She said that at the moment, the most difficult part of her training is memorizing down to the level of instinct what each switch and light on her flight display does or means.

Antonova said that if she has her choice she would prefer not to follow exactly in her father’s footsteps, and pilot Airbus or Boeing airliners on international routes. She said that she expects it will take years before she can get a commercial pilot’s license, and that because of both the war and the cost of the education, it’s not clear right now how she can finally qualify.

“But I’ve learned that it could be possible,” she said. “I have the belief that I can do it.”

Sofia Korniichuk

Korniichuk, 21, is a Zhytomyr native studying aviation electronics. Her father and brother are firefighters, and her whole family supports her decision to go into a technical field like aviation.

She decided she liked soldering, routing wires, and figuring out proper connections and resistance because she spent a lot of time helping her father and brother work on cars when she grew up. Her decision to study in Kyiv was driven less by aviation than by a desire to get into a strong technical school.

At KAI, Korniichuk has had to work hard at the mandatory hard science classes but, she said, no more than the male students. The work she’s enjoyed the most is drone construction and testing; teams of students put together aircraft, fly them, and decide how to improve them. Being a woman on an otherwise all-male team is “absolutely normal, we just do our experiments.”

“Sometimes there is a situation when I walk into a room full of engineers, and I get this reaction ‘Young lady, what are you doing here, did you get lost?’” Korniichuk said. “But that goes away as soon as you show you know what you’re doing, then you are just another engineer.”

Korniichuk said that joining the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) following graduation is a career path she is definitely considering, because drone development and construction are fields with a future, and because Ukraine is at war and needs technicians like that, she said.

Alla Pinchuk

Pinchuk, 22, grew up in Boryspil, north of Kyiv, near Ukraine’s biggest airport. She decided to go into aviation engineering, she said, not because of all the civilian airliners flying over her house, but because she likes technical subjects and probably because her father is a career communications industry worker, and her cousins are in telecommunications.

At KAI, Pinchuk has focused on communications and cybersecurity, and in her Bachelor’s program (she’s now a grad student), of the 30 students receiving degrees, 25 were men. Study and work were the same for both, she said.

Pinchuk was elected to be the class leader, a role common in Ukrainian universities, functioning something like a union representative between a student class and the university leadership. And her experience in that job was that some professors and students are easy to work with, some more difficult, but the gender made no difference.

Almost simultaneously with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Pinchuk was picked to organize the setup of the first 5G telephone communications network in Ukraine, a tiny footprint covering the KAI campus and not much more, but also a technical task no one in Ukraine had ever attempted.

She also was not a communications specialist, but she found setting up a network to operate at a standard new for the country was less a technical task than a managerial one.

“It was a lot of organizing and learning from different people in different skill areas, and getting the operation going,” she said.

According to Ukrainian news reports, external and domestic funding backed the project as a way to create high-speed, secure communication capacity for key Ukrainian institutions.

Pinchuk said she and her team “mostly” did not suffer from Russian bombardment of Kyiv with drones and missiles, but air raids and damaged public transportation are not normal problems for someone setting up a 5G communications network in most countries. Project management in academia or business is most likely in her future, she said.

The Kyiv Aviation Institute and Becoming a Pilot in Ukraine

The Kyiv Aviation Institute (KAI) is a leading Ukrainian technical university focusing on training a cadre for civilian aviation. Most applicants are from Kyiv and Kyiv region, with smaller student contingents from Zhytomyr, Cherkasy, Chernihiv, and Dnipro regions.

KAI counts put the student population at 11,033 active students, of whom 4,416 (40.03%) are women. In 2021, KAI graduated nine students with the pre-flight major “Flight Operations of Aircraft.” Ten graduated with that major in 2022, 28 in 2023, 29 in 2024, and 14 (so far) in 2025.

The university offers a wide range of technical fields for study besides aviation. In 2025, KAI graduated 1,523 students with degrees linked to aviation in fields like aerospace and electronics, in Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programs. Tuition for a bachelor’s degree program depends on the major chosen, but typically costs between Hr.35,000-40,000 ($840-$960) data provided by the university to Kyiv Post said.

For budding Ukrainian pilots, KAI is the first step in a possible multi-year education path leading to flying an actual aircraft. Prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, students majoring in Aircraft Flight Operations flew practice flights with an instructor; this became impossible once the Russian Air Force started targeting Ukrainian civilian aircraft and airfields.

KAI students completing the flight operations of aircraft degree program complete their practical flight training in the Czech Republic. In Ukraine, aside from the KAI, flight schools in Kropyvnytskyi and Zhytomyr train potential fixed-wing pilots, and a school in Kremenchuk trains potential rotary-wing pilots. Actual pilot licenses are issued by the State Aviation Service of Ukraine (Державіаслужба).

A KAI graduate with a degree, especially in aerospace, air traffic control, or aircraft flight operations, might volunteer for the Ukrainian military upon graduation, usually by agreeing ahead of time with a Ukrainian Air Force unit needing personnel with their specialty.

In Ukraine, the most common way for a student to become a military pilot is to attend and graduate from the Ivan Kozhedub Kharkiv National Air Force University (KhNUPS). However, civilians joining the Ukrainian Armed Forces with an aviation background may be trained as military pilots.