Danika's Trip Report - Second section

[Danika]

Flying was her current vocation, but it hadn’t been her first. Following in her father’s footsteps, she had initially pursued a career as an Aircraft Maintenance Engineer. At her father’s urging, immediately after high school, she’d attended the BC Institute of Technology and attained her AME certification. She’d had a huge advantage over her fellow students because, at the time, her father was in the aviation business. He and his business partner owned a modern and spacious hanger located at the south end of the airport, close to the seaplane base. From this facility they provided contract aircraft maintenance services for the many and sundry operators in the area. They also owned four small twin-engine aircraft that they leased to those same operators. It was a good business, although her father had frequently grumbled about it and had often said, “The quickest way to make a million bucks in the aviation business is to start with five.”

Danika had been brought up on aviation. She’d lived and breathed airplanes. She’d hung around her father’s business so much that the staff there referred to her as the ‘hanger brat’. She’d first grasped the control yoke of an airplane and felt it respond to her inputs while sitting in her father’s lap at the age of four. By the time she was fourteen she could re-fuel, pre-flight, start, taxi, take off, fly and land an airplane.
Danika officially got her pilot’s licence at the age of sixteen. The first airplane she’d soloed in had been a Cessna 182. Since then she’d piloted so many different types of aircraft that it was difficult for her to remember them all.

When Danika was fifteen years old her father had given her a job at the hanger. He’d figured that she was always there anyhow so she might just as well earn her keep. Officially she was to help keep the place spic-and-span; sweep, pick up rags, clean up fluid spills and put things away, that sort of thing. But often as not, she could be found helping her father on a job as he sweated and cursed and skinned his knuckles.
“Danny, you’ve got to pay for every job with a little blood offering to the aviation gods,” he would say after nicking himself.

Even though he didn’t have to, her father still liked to get his hands dirty. Danika understood that. She loved airplanes. She loved their sleek, aerodynamic shapes and the way the hanger lights reflected off their windows and shiny paint. She loved to run her hand along their smooth metal skins. And she loved the way they smelled. When an unfamiliar airplane came in for maintenance she would climb into the cockpit and sit there muttering to herself until she had touched and identified the purpose of each and every switch, gauge, lever and knob.

‘Danny’ – that’s what her father called her. She liked the nickname. It was no secret that he’d wanted a son. He would proudly introduce Danika to the guys around the hanger as, “Danny, my tomboy”. Danika became the son he never had.

Throughout her teens, while her girlfriends were perfecting their manicuring skills, it was all Danika could do to remove the grease that seemed to be permanently embedded under her fingernails.

By the time she attended her first AME class at BCIT, Danika had already wriggled around the inside, clambered over the top, and crawled under the fuselages of many types of small airplanes. Except for some of the theory, and until they got their hands on a big jet, virtually nothing that she was exposed to during the AME program was new to her. She’d been there and done that.

Consequently, she graduated top of her class, then officially went to work for her father. Still, flying was her real passion. If there was a flight check to do on one of the aircraft in the hanger, she would wrangle her way onto it. Her log book showed a steadily increasing tally of hours. She got checked-out on many of the aircraft types that went through the hanger. She earned her multi-engine endorsement and Instrument Flight Rules ticket.

She continued working at the hanger until she’d accrued the required time to attain her AME M-class certification, which she did at the relatively young age of twenty-four.

One day, looking at her accumulated hours and endorsements, she realized that it would be an easy jump for her to become a professional pilot. She could make a living at it, being paid to fly the machines that she loved. She had many contacts in the aviation industry and was confident that she could get an entry-level flying job whenever she wanted; she’d been told as much.