Samantha Davies

Samantha Davies is an instrument rated pilot working towards her commercial license and CFI/II. She's come to aviation by way of filmmaking, foreign languages, and an interdisciplinary journey across continents.

On New Year's Day, before Samantha was even a Private Pilot, she wrote a list of all her goals for 2025, which she keeps in her wallet. At the top of the list is "Commercial Pilot." Since then she's passed her Private and Instrument check rides, become a Form-5 IFR Pilot with the Civil Air Patrol, and received her Complex and High Performance endorsements.

Growing up in Denver, Samantha graduated summa cum laude from the University of Colorado with majors in Religious Studies and Chinese Language. She then spent much of her adult life overseas, primarily in India and China, refining her language abilities and cultural understanding while working as an English teacher, International Project Manager and Creative Director.

Although she completed her first solo at age 17, she decided to pursue academics, travel the world and absorb life like a sponge. With perspective and versatility, she's now returned to aviation with the goal of making it her life's bedrock. She aims to have a lifelong career as a pilot, but not just a pilot. She plans to integrate aviation with her professional experience in film and deliberate cross-cultural exchange to demonstrate the profound relationships between aviation accessibility, inclusivity, and safety.

In her future work and research, Samantha wants to embrace, understand and respect the human factor in aviation, not pretend to eliminate it. With the ultimate goal of improving aviation safety, she wants to explore the social psychology of aviation to address questions like: "How can transparency, vulnerability, and openness in aviation be recognized as safer cultural alternatives to the industry-wide, headstrong suppression of self?" And, "How will the very things that make us human, our specific character traits and individual life experiences, which in some cases are also responsible for mishaps, be the very same things that end up warranting our presence in the cockpit alongside intelligent automation?"

She enjoys mentoring, sharing resources, and engaging with communities that are under-represented in aviation. She volunteers her production skillset and equipment as an active member of the Ninety Nines, Women in Aviation International, and as a Civil Air Patrol Instrument pilot. Alongside flying, Samantha also composes songs on the piano, writes poetry and short stories, and paints oil and watercolor.