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When she was a little girl, Agnes Niyondezi looked up at the sky from a refugee camp in Zimbabwe and marvelled at the airplanes passing overhead. “I wondered how a plane stayed in the air and was not pulled down by gravity,” she remembers. “It made me want to discover how it flew.”

Today, Niyondezi, 19 and now living in Saskatoon, is on the way to becoming a professional pilot. Her goal is to eventually fly commercial airliners for WestJet or Air Canada.

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That achievement seemed out of reach when she was a child. Her family had fled war-torn Burundi and she was born in a refugee camp in Tanzania before moving to one in Zimbabwe. Members of a Saskatoon church sponsored the family’s emigration to Canada in 2016. In high school, Niyondezi was finally able to study aviation and, immediately after graduating, she enrolled at the local Mitchinson Flight Centre to get her private pilot’s licence. She plans to continue her flying education at Calgary’s Mount Royal University next year.

Niyondezi’s dream is to be the captain on an international airline, but she also has another one: “I want to inspire other refugee kids like me that they can become anything that they want to be,” she says.

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KJ Allen comes from Inuvik in the Northwest Territories, where air travel is essential. “We have a lot of medevacs and smaller planes taking in supplies and medical aid to our remote communities,” she says. “I grew up around that and it’s such an important job.”

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Allen, who is in her final year at the Alkan Air Flight Academy in Whitehorse, Yukon, plans to eventually pilot those planes. Her motivation is altruistic: “I’ve always wanted to be the one who helps others around our community,” she says.

With a father who works at the Inuvik airport and a mother who runs a travel business, an aviation career felt like a natural progression. And when Allen, 21, first got a chance to fly a plane, at the Edmonton Flying Club two years ago, her exhilaration sealed the deal. “I knew then that was what I was going to do.”

Alongside her medevac aspirations, Allen also wants to work as a flying instructor. She’d like to attract more women and Indigenous people like herself into aviation classes and show them that it’s a viable career. “There are a lot of options in this industry,” she says, “and I don’t think a lot of people know that.”

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Coming from a family of aviators, including a father who commanded the iconic Snowbirds, Callum French seemed destined for the skies. He was having none of it. A math-science whiz kid, French initially set his sights on a medical career. Only, he’d always been fascinated by space travel. (“Space is undeniably cool,” he says.)

So, the 20-year-old visionary has imagined his own hybrid discipline: space medicine. “It’s a field that doesn’t really exist yet,” he says. But given the advent of private space travel, it’s one that could be essential in the future.

“All of these billionaires are going to space right now,” he says, referring to the extraterrestrial ventures of Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk. “In 20 years, they might be sending normal people on these space cruises. And every cruise ship has a doctor onboard.”

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French is currently midway through a dual honour’s degree in chemical engineering and biochemistry at the University of Ottawa, which he says will give him the practical grounding to develop medical equipment for use in space. After he graduates, he plans to attend med school.

“I know it’s a bit ambitious to be an undergrad and say I want to create my own specialty,” French admits. “But if I could do that and make space accessible to anyone, that would be awesome.”

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Not every kid intrigued by space travel wants to be an astronaut. “Astronauts have to be really physically fit,” Annie Wang says. “I am fit – but not to that point,” she adds, laughing. Wang prefers to be behind the scenes, helping with the mechanics that allow them to go into space.

Now in her second year of a mechanical engineering degree at Polytechnique Montréal, Wang is aiming for a career as a technical expert in the aerospace industry. She plans to specialize in mechanical simulation, which plays a critical role in the development of flight technology.

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Wang says she was immersed in the arts as a child but in high school discovered she really loved math and physics. At the Polytechnique, she says she’s a bit of an anomaly among her fellow students.

“People in mechanical engineering usually like mechanical products – we have a lot of car lovers in our program,” she says. “For me, it isn’t the product itself but the tasks and the science behind it that are really interesting.”

In the future, Wang would like to encourage more women and young people to consider a career in mechanical engineering. “I think it’s a field that’s misunderstood by the general public,” she says.

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If there’s a greener way to fly, Brent Henman wants to be in on it. The 20-year-old Nova Scotian knows that global warming has made it imperative for the aviation industry to find a less environmentally damaging way to power its aircraft.

“We have all these electric and hybrid vehicles now, but planes are still flying around” using fossil fuels, he says. “But I’m very confident that there’s going to be a shift – there’s going to be a Tesla for the aerospace sector.”

Henman, whose family has a long history in the aviation and aerospace industry, says he flew a plane before he could drive a car. He credits his uncle, a veteran commercial pilot, with inspiring his career path. But it was a first-year environmental science course at Moncton Flight College that got him thinking about climate change and aviation’s contribution to the global crisis.

Now in his third year as an aviation major, Henman is taking a minor in physics with plans to also be an aerospace engineer. His ambition is to be involved in the research and development of flying technologies that use alternative energy sources – and then to be a test pilot for them. “I know I’m shooting for the stars,” he confesses, “but that’s my dream.”

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As an Afghan Canadian woman, Neghat Hidari sees an aviation career as something more than a personal choice. “I’m doing this for the girls back home in Afghanistan who aren’t able to pursue what they want to do,” says the young Torontonian, who is in her third year of the Honours Bachelor of Aviation Technology program at Seneca College.

Born in Mazar-i-Sharif, a city in the northern Balkh province, Hidari emigrated to Canada with her family at the age of six. While growing up, the idea of being a pilot was never on her radar. But after becoming obsessed with space exploration as a teenager, she decided aviation could be the route to an eventual job with the Canadian Space Agency.

Hidari first got behind the controls of a plane this summer and realized she’d made the right choice. “Being in the air, I felt this serenity and calmness overcome me,” she recalls. “I was expecting to be anxious, my heart beating fast, but instead I felt like I was in my element. It sounds super corny, but it just felt right.”

The RCAF Foundation Student Scholarship will help Hidari complete her studies at Seneca’s aviation school in Peterborough, Ont., after which her immediate plans are to experience as many types of flying as possible. “Whether it be bush, medevac, eventually airline – I just want to get a taste of everything,” she says.

Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio with Royal Canadian Air Force Foundation. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.