My brother bought me a flight lesson for a birthday. The instructor asked when they would see me again, and I was back the next day. Everything since has happened by accident.
That is the honest version of how I ended up running operations at a flight school in Cowra. There was no childhood dream, no plan. Just a lesson, then another one, then a life.
The teacher part came first
Before I flew, I was a primary school teacher. People treat that as trivia. It is actually the whole story.
Teaching small children teaches you two things that matter in a cockpit. Patience, and how to tell when someone has genuinely understood you rather than just nodded. I never stopped using either. Some people just can’t help but yack away and tell people stuff. That seems to be where I like to be.
Bankstown to Cowra
I was working at Bankstown and wanted a tree change. We picked Cowra partly because the council was genuinely supportive of what we wanted to build, and we started with just two of us.
It has been a team effort ever since. It is not something you can do on your own. We are a team of more than 20 now, and every instructor here was once a student here. Lots of little things come together, and then one day you look up and it is a school.
What I actually teach
Two simple things make a good pilot. One is common sense. The other is patience.
Everything else can be taught, and we teach it the long way first. You learn to do it all manually before you trust the automation, because if you can’t do it the long way, you can’t tell whether the computer is doing it correctly for you.
The other thing I have noticed after 25 years in aviation: the more you learn, the more you realise you don’t know, and so you tend to be a bit more measured. I would rather train a measured pilot than a confident one.
The award, since people ask
Someone asked me recently about the award. The formal title is the 2018 Royal Aeronautical Society Flight Instructor of the Year, and I had to be reminded what year it was.
I am glad it exists, mostly because of what it says about the team that trained alongside me. But it is not the recognition I keep. The feedback I keep is five words from a student: thank you for believing in me. It usually comes from the ones somebody else gave up on.
The ones who make it
One of ours rang at lunchtime a while back to say he was about to start with an airline. Ten photos. That is the job, right there.
Quite often the students who send those photos are the ones who were slower to start, or who came from somewhere bigger and got lost. Nobody gets lost here. There are no more than 12 people in a class and I know all of their names.
If any of this sounds like you
We sponsor ground school places for two women in aviation, and I am involved with the Australian Women Pilots’ Association. I don’t think of any of it as a campaign. It is not hard to do.
If you are wondering whether there is room for you in this industry, there is more on women in aviation at Fly Oz, or just come and see us. Request a campus visit, come out on a Friday and stay for the barbecue. Ask the students anything you like. We won’t hover.
