Fayola K J Fraser
At 26 years old, Grenadian Kyana Bubb has already managed to break barriers and impact change in her community. A self-published children’s book author and one of the youngest female air traffic controllers in Grenada, she has fearlessly created a path for herself in many ways where the paths did not before exist. Travelling has deepened her love and respect for planes, and in her heart, she believes that “the sky is my home.”
Bubb was born and raised in St Georges, Grenada, and attended St Georges Primary School and St Joseph’s Convent, St Georges. “I always loved planes,” she remembers. “We grew up travelling often as a family, and I remember my fascination began early. By 6 am, my brother and I would be outside waiting to see LIAT, or Caribbean Star, fly over the house.” As her interest in all things planes grew, she focused on subjects in school that would one day lead her to a career in the aviation industry. After completing her Associate’s Degree in pure math, geography, and physics, Bubb worked as an aeronautical information officer at the Maurice Bishop International Airport in Grenada. After performing excellently in this role for less than a year, she got the opportunity to get involved in air traffic control.
When she interviewed to join the air traffic control cohort, she then “had to make the hardest move ever, “to leave home where I had never moved from and move to Trinidad for eight months to pursue the diploma in air traffic control.” In August 2018, 20-year-old Bubb left Grenada for Trinidad and, for the first time, was on her own. Remembering her time in Trinidad, she got the opportunity to live and experience so many of the things she had only read about, such as the festival of Divali and the enthralling beauty of Tobago, which she felt mirrored Grenada in many ways that Trinidad did not.
As the youngest air traffic controller in Grenada (up to 2023), Bubb came from a family of plane lovers. When she was young, her father worked at the airport in Grenada before moving on to work on cruise ships. Her brother, also an avid plane fanatic, is pursuing his degree in aerospace engineering. She remembered initially striking up an interest in air traffic control when she saw air traffic control towers in her textbooks from secondary school.
Subsequently, her naturally inquisitive nature while working at the aeronautical information services made her dive deeper into the importance of the air traffic control officer. With her training in Trinidad under her belt, Bubb returned to Grenada to begin her role in air traffic control. “I still remember my first time speaking to an aircraft,” she muses. “It was a small aircraft, from Grenada to Carriacou, and I was terrified to say the wrong thing to the pilot.” As time has given her greater confidence in her abilities, she now looks towards the future, saving for pilot school, her next step in aviation.
Growing up in the Caribbean, she has had the benefit of experiencing the command of many female pilots on LIAT. As a child and teenager, she remembers hearing them do their checks and feeling duly impressed, visualising herself in that role one day. Thus, imagine her shock when, during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, she found herself mindlessly scrolling through Twitter and saw a tweet from someone in the US saying that they had never seen a woman fly a plane.
Shortly after, a friend of hers from the Bahamas who had just finished flight school described the way that when she was getting onto a plane, men around her doubted and decried her ability to fly an aircraft. Bubb, shocked by this series of occurrences, made a joke to her friends that she was going to write a book, not understanding “why in 2020 we have all these people doubting women’s abilities.”
In September 2020, she wrote her first draft of the story. Then, as many writers do, she let it sit and forgot about it completely. The inspiration for her book, “Adventures of Xola and Sage: Women in Aviation,” was her belief that “life doesn’t come with a manual with what is for men versus what is for women.” It follows two young girls on a quest to find the answer to whether women can fly planes too, encouraging young children to believe that there is no limit to what they can achieve.
By December, she felt drawn back to her book and started looking up Caribbean illustrators, eventually finding one from Carriacou who sent her a draft, and she knew immediately it would be her cover page. The people in her book were illustrated as people of colour, holding up a mirror for the real children of the Caribbean to be able to see themselves vividly in the book.
On March 29, 2021, her debut self-published book was released on Amazon, and within the first two days, Bubb sold over 60 copies. She had an official launch in May 2021 just for children, handing out cupcakes and pilot badges and letting them meet a pilot. “My goal in the launch and with the book was to educate boys and girls about women in aviation and more broadly, that women can do all the things men do. Boys also have to appreciate and respect having women in the same fields as them.”
Merging her love for aviation with important advocacy for women through literature, Kyana Bubb is leading a culture shift towards uplifting and empowering women in traditionally male-dominated fields.
