Anielka Espino, a Nicaraguan Living Her Dream to Fly
Eleven years ago, the young woman from Ocotal founded the “Buena Vida” (“Good Life”) brand of natural products. After moving to the US to study, she’s now fulfilling her yearning to become a pilot.
HAVANA TIMES – During the national emergency triggered by Hurricane Mitch in 1988, an eight-year-old girl watched astonished as a helicopter landed in her town of Ocotal, in the north of Nicaragua. When she saw the pilot step out of the cabin, the little girl thought: “I want to be a helicopter pilot.” Today, 26 years later, Anielka Espino Lopez – that same little girl – has fulfilled her dream, as she flies around the city of Miami, in the United States.
“I was just a small-town girl who had never seen an aircraft, so seeing the helicopter pilot step down made a great impression on me. He was bringing humanitarian aid to Ocotal,” recalled the Nicaraguan, now thirty-three years old.
Anieka Espino originally from Ocotal in the department of Nueva Segovia, has a degree in business communication, but is also an “aviator pilot,” who possesses two licenses: one for fixed wing crafts, or airplanes; and the other for rotor crafts, or helicopters.
The young women completed her university degree in Nicaragua; however, the desire stayed with her to “drive in the air.” During one of her trips to the United States, at a time her business in Nicaragua was going “well,” she began to pay for aviation studies at Broward College, a recognized aviation academy in Florida.
“First, I learned to fly with fixed wings. The career is quite expensive, and an hour of practice flight in an airplane can cost from 140 – 170 dollars. But becoming a helicopter pilot is much more expensive – there the hour of flight time averages between $500 and 600 dollars,” she detailed.
“Like everything in this life,” she continued, “first you have to do whatever you can, and later move on to what you want. I began learning to fly airplanes, and then continued with the helicopters. Now I have both licenses.”
The night before taking her flight test and her first “solo” flight, Anielka Espino ironed her suit and added some small bars to the shoulders, as well as her wings pin.
The next morning the weather was bad, but the Nicaraguan began her test flight with an instructor. She took off and performed the maneuvers the teacher ordered. When the plane landed, he got down, shut the door, and told her: “Go do your solo flight, you’re more than ready,” the pilot remembered.
“I felt so happy, so proud of myself, and I powered up the plane and took off. When I had risen about 700 feet, I began laughing like a crazy person,” she said.
When she finished her first solo, her classmates and instructors celebrated her with the “pilot ritual” – they bathed her with airplane oil and cut a little of her hair. “The ritual is so all will go well for you, if one day you have an an accident,” she explained.
“It was a dream come true, that feeling of power when you lift an aircraft into the air all by yourself. I remember laughing to myself in the air, I was so happy. It was my inner child, doing something I’d been told many times was going to be impossible. That it couldn’t happen for a woman,” recalled Anielka.
Private air tours
Currently, Anielka Espino works flying helicopters for her business “Spino Luxury Aviation,” offering charter flights and air tours of Miami. The twenty-five minute tour flies over the Miami beaches and iconic points along the coast, plus passing over Hard Rock Stadium, a multi-use arena where both the Miami Dolphins and the Miami Hurricanes play.
Anielka rents the Robinson R44 helicopters from a private company. Each trip holds 3 passengers and costs 600 dollars.
“The tourists can stick their feet out of the helicopter, because we almost always fly without doors so they feel more of an adrenaline rush. Also, photos showing feet extending from a helicopter in the foreground and all the buildings below have become very popular,” the businesswoman explained.
In addition, she’s hired more pilots to do daily tours whenever the weather allows. “We’re going to begin offering a higher-level luxury service where the clients get picked up in a limousine and driven to the airport. It will also include surprises in the case of people celebrating a marriage proposal or anniversary. We also want to land in places like hotels, buildings, anywhere that has a heliport, so they can get down and have dinner at a luxury restaurant,” she informed us.
“In the future I want to include larger aircraft, do charter flights, where people can fly from one state to another, from one city to another, but we’re still working towards that,” she stated.
Also the owner of the “Buena Vida” company
Anielka Espino was able to reach her dream of becoming a pilot “thanks to” a company she founded in Nicaragua, a brand of natural products called “Buena Vida.” She began the company 11 years ago in Ocotal, when some of her social media followers consulted the young woman about the products she used on her hair.
“I had a page with 3,000 followers, and everyone would ask me what I did to maintain pretty hair, and other such beauty tips. I’d offer them my recommendations. My first product was coconut oil,” the entrepreneur revealed.
“They told me the oil was hard to obtain, so I went to the Caribbean Coast to get the product and began bottling it in a homemade way. I sold the product to a number of girls, who recommended me to others, and they recommended me to others, until I had a fair number of requests, so I decided: ‘This is a business,’” she described.
When Anielka Espino began selling large quantities of the product, an “anonymous person” denounced her to the Nicaraguan Health Ministry, because the products weren’t registered with them. This impelled her to take the business to “another level.” The small businesswoman did the paperwork and obtained the needed permits from government institutions to register her products and open her own laboratory of natural cosmetics.
“Buena Vida” offers coconut oil, fat burners, a rejuvenating elixir – which is a protein produced in the United States – a line of shampoos and conditioners for every type of hair, plus shampoo for hair loss in men,” she enumerated.
When she began the business, she only had the support of her family to take orders; today the company employs about 50 people, mostly women, according to Anielka.
Anielka Espino supports women in Ocotal and other departments who wish to generate income. “Buena Vida” has a network of more than 300 women who can sell their products from home and by catalog.
Some of the “Buena Vida” cosmetics are sold through some outlets in the United States, added the Nicaraguan, who says that “they are in the process of marketing them in US supermarkets and other countries.”
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.