photo by Rimas ZailskasFor her first ten years of adulthood, Sherry Nesbitt was mainly a dutiful wife and mother. The Asheville native married an anesthesiologist, worked on and off as a nurse at Mission Hospital and raised her son, now 16. “I didn’t get out there and do a whole lot,” she says. “I did what was expected of me.” 

But something changed in 2005 when she decided, at age 40, to fly a plane. She and her then-husband took a weekend trip to Charleston and talked about taking flying lessons. The next week, she took a test flight at WNC Aviation, a flight school at the Asheville Regional Airport. As soon as she lifted off on that clear day in May, hands gripping the plane’s controls and staring out over Asheville, Hendersonville and Lake Lure, she knew she was hooked. She remembers that, on the car trip to Charleston, her husband had blurted out an idea that suddenly sounded quite appealing: “If you would [take lessons], I would buy you an airplane,” she recalls him saying. He was serious, and so was she. 

By October that year, Sherry had her pilot’s license and the couple had their eye on a speedy new single-engine plane, a Columbia 350, which is slightly larger and faster than a Cessna and comes with a $450,000 price tag. They happened to purchase the 500^th such plane sold by Columbia, which meant they flew out to the factory in Bend, Oregon, for a special ceremony. 

Then, Sherry took off. No more long slogs in the car or waiting in airport security lines. For the next year, she flew all the time, taking her son on weekend trips to Massachusetts or flying solo to Texas for a plane owners get-together. She took friends on weekend shopping trips to Tampa, Charlotte and Atlanta. The freedom was intoxicating, and Nesbitt describes the first few months with the plane as a “fairy tale sort of deal.” Her dad was a pilot, but she had only been a passenger and never flown. Still, she was confident in the air—cautious, but not afraid. “It’s just an incredible thing when you get up there,” she says. “You have total control. It’s a good place to think and relax.”

The toll the plane took on her marriage, though, had far from a fairy-tale ending. Flying had helped Nesbitt break out of her shell, which didn’t sit well with her husband. At some point, he asked her to give up flying, but she refused. “[Before flying], I didn’t have interests or hobbies of my own,” she says. “It’s a man’s world, but if you know what you’re doing, men really respect you. I had a great airplane. People would stop me and talk to me wherever we went.” 

The couple divorced two years ago, and with her son still living at home, Nesbitt felt it was prudent to sell her Columbia last summer. She lives in Arden and still rents planes from the Asheville airport, flying two or three times a month. She’s working toward her commercial multi-engine pilot’s license, hoping, after her son goes to college, to fly commercial aircraft or corporate jets. She’d also like to own her own plane again. (As a consolation prize she bought a Ducati Monster 696 motorcycle.) In the meantime, she loves renting planes and flying over the mountains, stopping at small airports around the region. In fall and spring, she soars over the Green River valley, reveling in the scenery. “Women should fly,” she says. “For me, it was a life-changing thing. People who knew me then and know me now say I’m not the same person. My whole self-confidence and self-esteem is better. I’m happier now than I ever have been in my life.” —J.M.