A year ago, at the age of 28, Melissa Vezasie was promoted to the Captain of a Boeing 737, a plane that carries 200 people, weighs 40 000 kg, flies up to 1000km per hour and lands at a speed of 250km per hour. Needless to say, it takes great skill to fly such a powerful beast and Melissa has that in droves.
In June of 2026, it was revealed that Melissa had been added to the Forbes Africa, 30 Under 30 list. As the name suggests, the 30 under 30 is a list that recognizes 30 of the continent’s most exceptional and influential young people under the age of 30. But what is it about Melissa that makes her so influential?
Back when she was still training to get a pilots licence, she recorded all her flights on her camera so that she could learn from them. It was just a learning tool but after a while, she decided to share these videos on Tiktok.
It was in 2020 when she started her Tiktok account (‘pilot_onthegram’) and it was meant to educate young people about flying and to inspire them to become pilots. She did not expect her account to blow up, but it did.
Within a year, her account had grown to several hundreds of thousands of followers with her videos getting tens of millions of views. Also within that year, with one of her videos being viewed 33 million times, she became the first South African pilot to have an account verified by Tiktok and won the 2022 TikTok Top Creator South Africa.
Today, her account sits at 1.2 million followers, her video views are in the hundreds of millions and she is actively being pursued by international luxury fashion and car brands to promote their products. Despite her popularity, she is still focused on her career as a pilot as well as educating and inspiring young people.
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