Yolanda Ndala-Kaunda is a Malawian commercial airline pilot and aviation advocate whose career has expanded the visible place of women in the country’s aviation sector. She trained in South Africa, entered commercial aviation when women were still rare in Malawian cockpits, and in March 2016 became Malawian Airlines’ first female captain, taking command of the airline’s Bombardier Q400 fleet. Her significance extends beyond the promotion itself. Over the following decade, Kaunda used the visibility created by her career to expose children to aviation, support women entering the profession, participate in Malawi’s first all-women-operated commercial flight, and help build aviation career events designed to widen the country’s future talent pipeline.
Category: Pioneer
Field: Aviation · Commercial Flight Operations · STEM · Aviation Education
The commercial pilot who became Malawian Airlines’ first female captain, then used the cockpit as a platform to expand who could imagine a future in aviation.
At a Glance
Kaunda’s career is useful to examine as more than a “first woman” story. It shows how representation can propagate through a professional system. As a teenager, she met an earlier Malawian woman pilot and saw proof that aviation was possible. She then entered flight school as the only woman among roughly 80 trainees, progressed into commercial operations, attained command, and subsequently became the person younger women and girls could observe. By the 2020s, she was helping move that process beyond individual inspiration through aviation career fairs and airshows that gave thousands of Malawian children direct access to aircraft, pilots and information about aviation careers.
| Born | 1987, Lilongwe, Malawi |
| Country | Malawi |
| Field | Commercial aviation, flight operations and aviation education |
| Known For | Malawian Airlines’ first female captain; commercial pilot; aviation advocate |
| Education | Kamuzu Academy; Progress Flight Academy, South Africa; command training through Ethiopian Aviation Academy |
| Major Roles / Organizations | Air Malawi / Malawian Airlines; Phantom Aviation; The Ninety-Nines |
| First / Record / Milestone | First female captain of Malawian Airlines; captain of Malawi’s first all-women-operated and supported commercial flight |
| GDT Category | Pioneer |
Contemporary profiles place Kaunda’s birth in 1987, consistent with The Nation describing her as 30 in 2017 and recording that she entered flight school at 19 after completing secondary school.
Why She’s a Girls Do That Champion
Aviation is an unusually useful sector for understanding the difference between aspiration and access.
A child may want to become a pilot.
But between the idea and the cockpit lies a system:
secondary education,
specialized flight training,
licensing,
flight hours,
aircraft ratings,
commercial employment,
recurrent training,
promotion,
and finally command.
Each stage creates a point at which people can fall out of the pipeline.
Gender adds another variable.
When girls rarely see women in technical aviation roles, the profession can appear inaccessible before formal training has even begun.
Kaunda’s contribution occurred at both ends of that system.
She successfully travelled through the professional pipeline herself.
Then she began working to make the pipeline more visible to those coming behind her.
That distinction is what makes her a Girls Do That Champion.
The important achievement is not simply:
a woman flew the aircraft.
It is that after she did, more girls possessed evidence that they could too.
Her Story
The Ambition Started at Six
Yolanda Ndala-Kaunda was born and raised in Lilongwe.
She has said that she wanted to become a pilot from approximately the age of six.
There was no family aviation tradition directing her toward the profession. In a 2017 interview with The Nation, Kaunda said nobody in her family had worked in aviation; the interest came from her own fascination with aircraft.
She attended Kamuzu Academy in Kasungu, completing her secondary education before leaving Malawi for professional flight training.
At 19, she enrolled at Progress Flight Academy in South Africa.
There were approximately 80 people in her training cohort.
She was the only woman.
That fact captures one of the structural conditions surrounding her career.
Kaunda did not enter an institution in which women and men participated at roughly equal rates and happen to outperform her peers.
She entered an environment in which her gender made her immediately exceptional.
The technical requirements, however, were the same.
Theory.
Flight instruction.
Assessment.
Licensing.
Performance.
The aircraft did not have a different operating standard because the person flying it was a woman.
Learning at Professional Speed
Kaunda has described the pace of flight school as demanding.
Theory was taught in the morning.
Flying followed in the afternoon.
Material had to be absorbed quickly and then translated into practical decision-making in the aircraft.
This is an important part of the story because commercial aviation is sometimes discussed through the glamour of travel rather than the structure of professional competence.
A pilot is operating inside a highly regulated safety system.
Training is cumulative.
Errors matter.
Aircraft systems have to be understood.
Weather has to be interpreted.
Fuel calculations have to be correct.
Standard operating procedures exist for a reason.
And certification is progressively earned.
Kaunda completed the process and entered commercial aviation.
She subsequently joined Air Malawi, the predecessor to the current Malawian Airlines operation.
The Women Before Her
Kaunda’s story did not begin the history of women in Malawian aviation.
That distinction matters.
When she was about 14, she met Felistas “Fellie” Matengo-Mkandawire, an earlier Malawian woman pilot.
Kaunda later recalled being inspired by the meeting even though Mkandawire had already stopped flying.
There is an important transmission mechanism here.
One woman enters.
A younger girl sees her.
The girl acquires information she did not previously have:
This occupation is available to someone like me.
Years later, that girl becomes the person another child sees.
This is how representation becomes cumulative.
From Pilot to Captain
A commercial pilot and an airline captain are not interchangeable designations.
The captain is the aircraft commander.
Responsibility ultimately sits with the person occupying that seat.
That includes decisions concerning flight safety, weather, fuel, routing, aircraft condition and the people onboard.
In early 2016, Kaunda completed command training through the Ethiopian Aviation Academy.
On 11 March 2016, she inaugurated her first flight as captain at Kamuzu International Airport.
Ethiopian Airlines’ own April 2016 publication recorded that she had become Malawian Airlines’ first female captain on the Bombardier Q400 after completing her command training at the academy.
She now wore four stripes.
But more importantly, she now carried command authority.
What Command Actually Means
One of the most useful accounts of Kaunda’s career concerns a flight shortly after she became captain.
The aircraft encountered severe weather.
Reaching the destination required altering the expected path and circling rather than proceeding directly.
Passengers became anxious.
There was external pressure.
But the flight crew had information the passengers did not.
They knew their fuel status.
They understood the weather.
They understood the aircraft.
They knew the safer decision.
Kaunda later summarized the principle:
“The right decision is the right decision. My job is to get from one point to the next, with everyone that I am with, safe.”
That is a better explanation of captaincy than the title itself.
Command is not authority for its own sake.
It is responsibility under uncertainty.
A Note on the Historical Record
Kaunda is routinely described in contemporary Malawian reporting — and is still described by The Ninety-Nines in 2026 — as Malawi’s first female captain.
There is, however, an archival inconsistency worth preserving rather than obscuring.
A separate 2016 Nation article identified Veronica Foy as an earlier Malawian female pilot who had reached captain rank with Air Malawi before later flying for Vietnam Airlines. Other contemporary reporting identifies Fellie Mkandawire as Malawi’s first female pilot and states that she retired as a senior first officer.
The strongest uncontested formulation is therefore:
Yolanda Kaunda became Malawian Airlines’ first female captain in March 2016.
That achievement is directly documented by Ethiopian Airlines, Malawian media and the airline’s contemporaneous leadership.
Preserving that distinction matters because documenting women’s history properly requires more than repeating whichever “first” appears most often online.
An Entire Aviation System Run by Women
A year after Kaunda attained command, Malawian Airlines did something more ambitious than putting one woman in the captain’s seat.
In March 2017, the airline operated a Bombardier Q400 flight from Blantyre to Dar es Salaam, stopping in Lilongwe.
Kaunda was captain.
Lusekelo Mwenifumbo was first officer.
But the intervention extended beyond the cockpit.
Cabin operations were handled by women.
Check-in was handled by women.
Customer service was handled by women.
Air traffic control was handled by women.
Ground operations, security and other flight-support functions were also staffed by women.
This made the event more interesting than a symbolic “female pilots” flight.
It demonstrated an entire aviation operating chain.
Aviation requires far more than pilots:
engineers,
technicians,
air traffic controllers,
dispatchers,
ground staff,
security personnel,
cabin crew,
airport operations,
commercial teams.
The flight made women visible across that system.
From Being the Only Woman to Flying With Another Woman
For much of Kaunda’s early commercial career, she had been the woman in the cockpit.
In 2017, she described how significant it felt to finally operate with another Malawian woman pilot.
The all-women flight placed First Officer Lusekelo Mwenifumbo beside her.
That changed the picture.
One woman in a profession can be interpreted as an exception.
Two begin to look like a pathway.
Three become a cohort.
Eventually, gender stops being noteworthy.
The objective of representation is not permanent exceptionality.
It is normalization.
Performance, Not Permission
Kaunda has repeatedly returned to the same argument when discussing women in aviation.
Technical standards do not become different because the pilot is a woman.
In her 2017 Nation interview, she rejected the idea that women should be judged against a separate professional standard.
The training was the same.
The work was the same.
The outcome was determined by performance.
That framing is useful.
Equality in technical fields is not a request to lower the threshold.
It is a demand for equal access to the opportunity to meet it.
The Pipeline Problem
Once Kaunda had become visible nationally, another problem became obvious.
Aviation careers were poorly understood by many Malawian children.
For some, “working for an airline” meant the occupations they most commonly saw.
The technical ecosystem remained distant.
And aviation training is expensive.
Information about entry routes is unevenly distributed.
Exposure matters because children cannot plan toward careers they do not know exist.
Kaunda increasingly began working on that problem.
Girls in STEM
In 2017, Kaunda and Mwenifumbo shared their experiences with girls attending the Women in Science Girls STEAM Camp.
The event placed practicing women from aviation and other technical disciplines directly in front of girls considering their own future careers.
In 2018, Kaunda spoke to girls undertaking technical and vocational programmes at There Is Hope in Dzaleka, discussing the financial, social and psychological barriers that can interrupt ambition.
She told the students:
“To attain one’s dreams is not easy, there are always challenges.”
Her own training history made the message concrete.
She had not merely been told women could become pilots.
She had trained as the only woman among dozens of men and then entered the profession.
From Inspiration to Infrastructure
Individual school visits can affect students.
But they have limited scale.
Kaunda’s later work moved toward something larger.
Through Phantom Aviation, she became involved in building aviation airshows and career events in Malawi.
In November 2023, Phantom Aviation organized what was billed as Malawi’s first aviation career fair and airshow at the Old Lilongwe Airport.
The programme brought together commercial aircraft, the Malawi Defence Force, private operators, aerobatic performers and aviation professionals.
The objective included exposing schoolchildren to both aircraft and careers.
Kaunda, speaking as a Phantom Aviation representative and Malawi Airlines captain, explained that the event was intended to provide more information for people interested in entering the sector.
This represents an important shift.
Her career had begun with a girl wanting to fly.
Now she was helping construct an environment in which large numbers of children could encounter aviation directly.
Why an Airshow Can Be Development Infrastructure
An airshow can look like entertainment.
But when paired with a career fair, it can also function as information infrastructure.
Career choice depends partly on information.
Children need to know:
what jobs exist,
what qualifications they require,
where training happens,
what subjects matter,
what the work looks like,
and whether people from their own communities actually do it.
For a child who has never been close to an aircraft, aviation may be conceptually remote.
An aviation career day collapses some of that distance.
The aircraft is physically there.
The engineer is there.
The pilot is there.
Questions can be asked.
A possibility becomes observable.
Scaling Exposure
The programme continued.
In 2024, reporting around Phantom Aviation’s next airshow described plans to provide approximately 1,000 underprivileged children with free access to the event, including children drawn from districts across Malawi.
Voice of America subsequently reported that Kaunda and Mwenifumbo were organizing airshows with the Malawi Air Force to expose children to aviation, with one event attracting around 1,000 underprivileged children.
That is a materially different intervention from being an inspirational speaker.
The unit of impact changes.
Instead of:
one pilot → one audience
the model begins to become:
aviation ecosystem → organized platform → large cohort of children
That is how representation starts becoming pipeline development.
The Ninety-Nines
Kaunda is also a member of the African Section of The Ninety-Nines, the international organization of women pilots founded in 1929.
The organization exists to advance women in aviation through education, scholarships, professional support and community.
In July 2026, The Ninety-Nines profiled Kaunda in its “Notable 99s” coverage and identified her as a member of its African Section.
The relationship places her local work inside a much longer international history of women building professional networks around aviation.
Still in the Cockpit
The story is not retrospective.
Kaunda continues to fly.
In September 2024, reporting identified Kaunda and Senior First Officer Lusekelo Mwenifumbo as the flight crew that had flown Malawi’s then-President Lazarus Chakwera to Johannesburg.
And in August 2026, another all-women flight deck became part of a very different national moment.
Malawi’s women’s national football team, the Scorchers, returned home after their historic WAFCON campaign.
The Malawi Airlines flight into Lilongwe was operated by Captain Yolanda Kaunda and First Officer Winnie Msachi, with an all-women crew arranged to mark the team’s achievement.
There is something structurally significant about that image.
Women who had expanded Malawi’s possibilities in one profession were transporting women who had expanded them in another.
Neither event depended on symbolism alone.
The footballers had performed.
The pilots had qualified.
The point was competence.
What Her Career Changed
The systems question is straightforward:
What was different after Yolanda Kaunda entered Malawi’s aviation system?
At Malawian Airlines, a woman had reached command.
A second woman could sit beside her on the flight deck.
An entire commercial flight could be operated and supported by women.
Girls attending technical programmes could hear directly from a working airline captain.
Children who had never interacted with aviation could attend career fairs and inspect aircraft.
Malawian women pilots gained greater connection to an international professional network.
And by 2026, an all-women commercial flight deck no longer needed to exist only as a once-off International Women’s Day demonstration.
Women could simply be assigned to fly the aircraft.
That is institutional progress.
The Representation Chain
Kaunda’s biography contains a useful model for understanding how professional representation propagates.
Fellie Mkandawire was visible to Yolanda Kaunda.
Kaunda met her as a teenager.
Yolanda Kaunda became visible to Lusekelo Mwenifumbo and other younger pilots.
They eventually shared a cockpit.
Kaunda and her peers became visible to thousands of schoolchildren.
Airshows and career fairs expanded the audience.
The system therefore moved from individual precedent toward organized exposure.
The objective is eventually to make the chain unnecessary.
When enough women occupy a profession, a young girl does not require a special historical example to prove she belongs there.
She simply sees pilots.
Some of them are women.
Milestones
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1987 | Born in Lilongwe, Malawi |
| Childhood | Develops an ambition to become a pilot from approximately age six |
| c. 2001 | Meets pioneering Malawian pilot Fellie Mkandawire as a teenager |
| 2005 | Completes secondary education at Kamuzu Academy |
| c. 2006 | Enters Progress Flight Academy in South Africa at 19; trains as the only woman among roughly 80 students |
| Late 2000s | Enters commercial aviation with Air Malawi |
| 2016 | Completes command training through Ethiopian Aviation Academy |
| 11 March 2016 | Begins command flying as Malawian Airlines’ first female captain on the Bombardier Q400 |
| 2017 | Captains Malawi’s first all-women-operated and supported Malawian Airlines flight from Blantyre to Dar es Salaam via Lilongwe |
| 2017 | Participates in WiSci Girls STEAM Camp, speaking with girls about careers in aviation |
| 2018 | Speaks to girls in technical and vocational education at Dzaleka about persistence and professional ambition |
| 2019 | Participates in activities of The Ninety-Nines’ African Section |
| 2023 | Helps represent Phantom Aviation in organizing Malawi’s first aviation career fair and airshow |
| 2024 | Continues aviation-outreach work through large-scale airshows targeting underserved children |
| 2024 | Flies Malawi’s President to Johannesburg alongside Senior First Officer Lusekelo Mwenifumbo |
| July 2026 | Recognized by The Ninety-Nines as a notable member of its African Section |
| August 2026 | Captains the all-women Malawi Airlines flight deck bringing the Scorchers home following their historic WAFCON campaign |
In Her Own Words
“The right decision is the right decision. My job is to get from one point to the next, with everyone that I am with, safe.”
— Yolanda Ndala-Kaunda, The Nation, 2017
“To attain one’s dreams is not easy, there are always challenges.”
— Yolanda Ndala-Kaunda, speaking to girls at Dzaleka, 2018
Read · Watch · Listen
Read
Yolanda Ndala-Kaunda and Lusekelo Mwenifumbo — The Nation
The strongest long-form interview available on Kaunda’s training, professional decision-making, experience as a woman in aviation and approach to command.
Meet Yolanda Kaunda, Malawi’s First Female Captain — The Ninety-Nines
A current 2026 recognition of Kaunda as a member of the international organization’s African Section.
Malawi to Host Aviation Show — The Nation
A useful account of the shift from individual representation toward organized aviation-career exposure through Phantom Aviation.
Watch
Malawi Female Pilots Bring Aviation Dreams to Rural Children — Voice of America
A 2024 video report on Kaunda and Lusekelo Mwenifumbo’s work exposing children to aviation through airshows.
Malawi’s First Female Aircraft Captain — Yolanda Kaunda
Listen
#MomLife — Yolanda Kaunda
A long-form conversation with Kaunda covering her life, family, faith and aviation journey.
Go Deeper
The Ninety-Nines — International Organization of Women Pilots
Kaunda is a member of its African Section.
Malawi’s First All-Women-Operated Flight
The 2017 flight demonstrated women working across the cockpit, cabin, air traffic, ground and airport-support system.
Phantom Aviation and Malawi’s Aviation Career Pipeline
Coverage of the country’s first major aviation career fair and airshow.
Sources & Further Reading
Ethiopian Airlines. (2016, April). What’s up @ ET in April 2016. Ethiopian Airlines PDF
Hadfield, R. (2026, July 22). Meet Yolanda Kaunda, Malawi’s first female captain. The Ninety-Nines. The Ninety-Nines
Malawi24. (2016, March 10). Yolanda Kaunda becomes Malawi’s first ever female captain. Malawi24
Malawi24. (2017, March 17). Malawian Airlines makes history with all-female crew. Malawi24
Malawi24. (2018, September 29). First Malawian airline female captain inspires girls. Malawi24
Masina, L. (2024, November 18). Malawi female pilots bring aviation dreams to rural children. Voice of America. Voice of America
Mlanjira, D. (2026, August 19). All women flight deck brings the Scorchers home. Maravi Express. Maravi Express
Nation Online. (2017, August 6). Yolanda Ndala-Kaunda and Lusekelo Mwenifumbo. The Nation
Nation Online. (2023, November 23). Malawi to host aviation show. The Nation
Puma Energy. (2023, November 25). Puma Energy attracts new talent at Malawi Air Show. Puma Energy
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