From Flight Attendant to Furlough to CFI in 18 Months
Most pilots wear one hat. Our latest guest wears three at once, and she does each one well.
Carly Chamerlik is an active CFI in Tennessee, a content creator with over 50,000 followers on Instagram, and a member of the marketing team at Jeppesen ForeFlight. In this episode, host Tim Jedrek pulls apart her story and finds lessons every flight school owner can use.
She has been in aviation for eight years. It started with a fine arts degree, a year of post-college travel through Europe and India, and a flight attendant job at United Airlines that she planned to keep for “just a year.”
She fell in love with the lifestyle but could see the ceiling. She also kept getting invited to the flight deck during long flights. Same schedule as the pilots. Five times the pay. A door they could close.
The pull was already there.
The Furlough That Changed Everything
When COVID hit in 2020, United furloughed roughly 5,000 flight attendants from the bottom of the roster. Carly was one of them.
Instead of waiting it out, she leaned into her art background. She started a photography business out of her Chicago apartment, working with product-based businesses around the country. Then she made a decision that shaped the rest of her career.
She moved to Arizona and started a Part 141 program at Falcon Field in Mesa with one hour of total time, a discovery flight she had taken months earlier. Eighteen months later, she had her CFI-I.
For flight school owners, that’s worth pausing on. The modern student is no longer just a 19-year-old chasing the airlines. Many are like Carly. They are career-changers, mid-pandemic pivots, people walking in with one hour of total time and a clear timeline.
How She Built an Audience as a CFI
After earning her CFI, Carly worked as an independent instructor in Tennessee from 2023 into 2024. The content started organically. She posted clips from her flights so her friends and family could see what she was doing. The clips took off.
She leaned in and made a conscious shift. Her content moved from personal flying clips to genuinely useful posts for student pilots and independent CFIs. That is when the audience grew past 50,000.
Her advice for any CFI or flight school sitting on the fence about content is simple. Let yourself be seen. Show your face. Let people hear your voice. A still graphic with text on it will not book you a client. A 30 second video walking through how you brief weather in ForeFlight will.
She also pushed back on the idea that you need polish to start. Her first videos were not great. Her words. Tim’s too. Consistency is the unlock, not production value.
Online + In Person Is the Real Playbook
One of the strongest sections of the episode for school owners and independent CFIs was Carly’s hybrid marketing approach.
She now flies out of a small, untowered country airport in Tennessee. The online playbook still works, but the local game is different. Business cards in the FBO. Walking around. Stopping by people’s hangars. Making friends.
Her recommendation for any independent CFI or small school is to run both. Online builds reach. In person builds trust faster than any algorithm can.
That blend matters because trust is the gating factor on every flight school decision. Students and their parents do not book a discovery flight from a stranger.
ForeFlight Behind the Curtain
Carly’s day job at Jeppesen ForeFlight came through Instagram. A team member messaged her after seeing her Flying Magazine work and her social content. She has now been there full-time for over a year, writing blog posts, emails, and landing pages for new feature releases.
The most relevant moment for flight school owners came when she walked through Debrief, the track logs feature that launched on web last year and is rolling out on mobile.
Debrief gives you a full breakdown of any flight, with scores on maneuvers like steep turns. For a CFI sitting down with a student, that means you can play back the flight, point to the data, and stop relying on memory. For a school, it’s a built-in training and debrief tool that most students already have access to.
She also confirmed that ForeFlight typically saves its biggest feature launches for AirVenture Oshkosh in late July. If you run a school, that is a date to watch.
Children of the Magenta Line
Tim raised the question every CFI has an opinion on. Is all this automation helping or hurting student pilots?
Carly’s answer was measured and worth quoting in spirit. She trained at a 141 with G1000s but still flew pilotage, dead reckoning, and paper charts. Learning the fundamentals on paper helped her understand what the technology was actually doing.
Her position is not anti-tech. It’s foundation-first. Introduce ForeFlight as a tool that supports good flying. Not as a crutch. If the iPad dies, the student should not be shocked.
For school owners building a syllabus or interviewing new CFIs, that’s a useful filter.
What’s Next for Carly
She is staying in general aviation. She co-owned a plane with her dad and is planning to buy solo in the next year and a half.
She is also bringing her art background back into focus. She has a BFA in painting and is working on creative projects that blend aviation and visual art. It is a reminder she repeated through the episode. Pilots are not one thing. The most interesting careers in aviation tend to belong to the people who refuse to be.
She’ll also be at AirVenture Oshkosh at the end of July, working with the ForeFlight media team. If you’re going, look for the person with the long lens.
The Three Takeaways for Flight School Owners
- The modern student does not follow a straight line. Carly’s path is now common, not unusual. Build for it.
- Content marketing works when the human shows up. Face on camera, voice in the audio, consistency over polish.
- ForeFlight is more than a flight bag. Debrief alone is worth a closer look for any school still doing post-flight reviews from memory.
Ready to Apply What You Heard?
Every episode of The Aviation Business Podcast is built to give flight school owners something they can use the next day. If you want help putting these ideas to work inside your own school, that’s exactly what we do.
Book a strategy call with the RRM team and we’ll show you what’s working right now for schools like yours.
Ready to Apply What You Hear?
Every episode of The Aviation Business Podcast is built to give flight school owners something they can actually use. If you want help putting these ideas to work inside your own school, that’s exactly what we do.
Book a strategy call with the RRM team and we’ll show you what’s working right now for schools like yours.