Some flight-school stories start with a childhood dream and a model airplane on a shelf. Zedric Von Schneider's didn't. His starts in 2007, when his parents' real-estate brokerage collapsed in the financial crisis and the family fell into debt — and he began working to help support the household at age 11.
By 23, with no savings and no clear path forward, he found the only job he could get that didn't require capital he didn't have.
"Twenty three years old lang ako noon. Hindi ko alam kung anong gagawin ko. Wala akong pera para man lang siya isang second hand na motor. Ang ma-afford ko lang noon is bisikleta. At nag-apply na ako sa mga food delivery apps." Zedric Von Schneider
Translation: "I was only twenty-three years old then. I didn't know what to do. I didn't even have money for a second-hand motorcycle. All I could afford at the time was a bicycle. So I applied to food delivery apps."
He delivered food around Cebu for a living. It's the kind of job that rarely makes the news — until the person doing it ends up in a flight suit a few years later.
From the road to the cabin — and now the cockpit
Zedric's path out of delivery work ran through the airline industry first: he became a flight attendant, working cabin crew while looking for a way to go further. Today he's a CAFS cadet, training toward his pilot's license while still flying as crew — a schedule that leaves little room for anything else, with roughly two years of training still ahead of him.
Last week brought a milestone every student pilot remembers for the rest of their career: his first solo flight, followed by the traditional "air baptism" that CAFS instructors give every cadet who lands one for the first time alone at the controls.
Hindi imposible."
Translation: "I want to say it's not impossible. Not impossible."
That line is the one GMA News built its headline around, and it's easy to see why. Zedric isn't a privileged kid who always had a clear runway to this career — he's someone who worked from age 11, delivered food at 23 because it was the only option he had, and is now partway through the same ab initio training that every airline captain in the Philippines once went through.
Why we're sharing this
CAFS trains cadets from more than a dozen countries, at every stage of life and every starting budget. Most of those journeys never make television. Zedric's did — and the reason a national outlet like GMA News picked it up is the same reason we're proud to have him training with us: it's a real story about a real person closing the distance between where they started and where they're headed, one flight hour at a time.