Alum Soars Into Aviation History As a Southwest Airlines Pilot

On a clear day in December 2025, Kinaya Ware, a 2016 graduate of Texas State University, stepped into the flight deck of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 at Houston’s Hobby Airport. It was a momentous occasion for First Officer Ware—her inaugural flight as a commercial pilot with Southwest.   

Ware was focused on her work as she taxied to the runway, but she was aware that more than a dozen of the 143 passengers onboard were there to cheer her on. Her parents, three sisters, grandparents, aunts, nieces, cousin, and boyfriend had joined the flight, all wearing matching sweatshirts to commemorate the occasion. Even the day’s route—from Houston to New Orleans—seemed personally significant. New Orleans was where her enslaved ancestors first arrived on the continent generations earlier, and Houston is where she and many relatives now live. “That meant a lot to me,” she says. “It was like going back to where we came from and seeing how far we’ve come.” 

Ware grew up in Beaumont and evinced a problem-solving mentality from an early age. By the time she was 11, she was helping with clerical tasks at the daycare her mother owned. When her mom became a flight attendant for Southwest two years later, Ware grew frustrated at her dayslong absences, caused in part by the long commute: Her mother had to drive to Houston and then fly to Baltimore, where her team was based. The solution seemed obvious to ever-practical Ware. “Why don’t I just fly you from Beaumont to Baltimore?” she wondered aloud, despite the fact that she’d only been on a plane once. 

When it was time for college, Ware enrolled at TXST, where she majored in Electronic Media and Mass Communication and earned a business minor, was an active member of Delta Sigma Theta, and juggled jobs in retail and bartending. Her freshman year, she took Associate Professor Laurie Fluker’s introductory mass communication course. Ware liked the subject matter, but it was Fluker’s obvious delight in her work that made the biggest impact. 

“She was living her dream, and it was contagious,” Ware says. “You could see that she loved what she was doing—and she made the material interesting, because she was so interested in it.” 

For her part, Fluker remembers Ware as a student who stood out in a 300-seat lecture hall. Ware would linger after class to ask questions. 

“She was bright, and she was professional from day one,” Fluker says. “You don’t often see students who come in as prepared as Kinaya was.” 

Ware enjoyed her courses and her internship at KSAT, San Antonio’s ABC affiliate. But she realized she didn’t have the enthusiasm for broadcast journalism that Fluker had exhibited for teaching. “I was looking for direction, for more of a passion, and I just hadn’t quite found it,” she says.  

She knew her mother and several other relatives enjoyed their work as flight attendants for Southwest, so she joined them in 2017, applying the skills she’d learned in her communication courses and in her service industry jobs: “being quick on your feet with conversation and delivering that Southern hospitality.” She especially enjoyed taking care of the pre-boarders who needed extra assistance. 

As much as she loved the work, she suspected she wouldn’t remain a flight attendant forever. In 2019, still curious about life as a pilot, Ware signed up to be a passenger on a discovery flight—a short jaunt in a small trainer aircraft that’s meant to show a budding aviation student both the thrill of flying and the reality of the learning process. The planes where students earn their certifications are small and lack air conditioning, and many prospective pilots decide they don’t want to spend hundreds of hours in that setting.  

But Ware was hooked. In 2021 she was accepted into Southwest’s Destination 225° Program, a full-time pilot training course. She left her job as a flight attendant and began earning her certifications to fly in progressively more complex situations. “It was mentally stimulating for me,” she says. “This was fun, it was a challenge, and it appealed to my problem-solving nature.” 

Fewer than 1 percent of professional pilots are women of color, according to Sisters of the Skies, an organization for women pilots of color. Becoming Southwest’s eighth Black woman pilot was exciting, though the distinction sometimes came with pressure. Ware says she has always felt supported by her colleagues as well as by Sisters of the Skies, the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals, and Women in Aviation International. These groups helped banish her initial impostor syndrome, Ware says, by reminding her that she had done the work, she was qualified, and the FAA had issued her a certificate to prove it.   

As Ware touched down at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport last December, she could hear applause through the flight deck door. It wasn’t just her family; the other passengers had learned that it was Ware’s first flight, and everyone was clapping for her. One voice rose above the rest: her father’s, shouting, “You did good, princess!” 

Ware says she aims to advance from first officer to captain, a process that will take between seven and ten years and that began on that auspicious December morning.  

“That was the best day of my life,” she says. “Every piece just fell right into place.”