Carly Chamerlik wears three hats at once and does each one well. She 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. Eight years into her aviation career, her path — fine arts degree, flight attendant, furlough, career-change student pilot — looks nothing like the traditional route, which is exactly why flight school owners should pay attention to it.
Career Path
- Fine Arts Foundation: Earned a BFA in painting, followed by a year of post-college travel through Europe and India
- United Airlines Flight Attendant: Took the job planning to stay “just a year,” fell in love with the lifestyle, and kept getting invited to the flight deck on long flights
- 2020 Furlough: Among roughly 5,000 flight attendants furloughed from the bottom of the roster when COVID hit
- Photography Business: Leaned on her art background, running a photography business out of her Chicago apartment for product-based clients nationwide
- Part 141 in 18 Months: Moved to Arizona and started a Part 141 program at Falcon Field in Mesa with one hour of total time; earned her CFI-I eighteen months later
- Independent CFI: Instructed independently in Tennessee from 2023 into 2024, and continues flying out of a small untowered airport there
Content and Audience
Carly’s content started organically — clips posted so friends and family could see what she was doing. When those took off, she made a deliberate shift toward genuinely useful posts for student pilots and independent CFIs, and the audience grew past 50,000.
- Show the Human: Face on camera and voice in the audio; a still graphic with text will not book a client, but a 30-second video briefing weather in ForeFlight will
- Consistency Over Polish: Her first videos were not great, by her own assessment — consistency is the unlock, not production value
- Hybrid Playbook: Online builds reach; business cards in the FBO, walking the ramp, and stopping by hangars build trust faster than any algorithm
- Flying Magazine: Her published work and social presence led directly to being recruited by ForeFlight
Jeppesen ForeFlight
Carly’s day job came through an Instagram message from a team member who had seen her Flying Magazine work. She has been full-time for over a year, writing blog posts, emails, and landing pages for new feature releases.
- Debrief: The track logs feature that launched on web and is rolling out on mobile, giving a full flight breakdown with scores on maneuvers like steep turns
- Training Value: Lets a CFI play back a flight and point to data instead of relying on memory during post-flight review
- Release Cadence: ForeFlight typically saves its biggest feature launches for AirVenture Oshkosh in late July
Areas of Expertise
- Aviation Content Marketing: Building an engaged audience as a working CFI without a production budget
- Independent CFI Business: Combining online reach with in-person local presence at small, untowered fields
- EFB Software: Practical, instructional knowledge of ForeFlight features and how schools can use them
- Career-Change Students: Firsthand perspective on the non-traditional student who arrives with one hour of total time and a clear timeline
Key Insights for Flight School Owners
- The modern student does not follow a straight line: Career-changers and mid-career pivots are now common, not unusual — build for them
- Content works when the human shows up: Trust is the gating factor on every flight school decision, and students do not book a discovery flight from a stranger
- Foundation before automation: She trained on G1000s but still flew pilotage, dead reckoning, and paper charts; introduce ForeFlight as a tool that supports good flying, not a crutch
- Pilots are not one thing: The most interesting aviation careers tend to belong to people who refuse to be defined by a single role
