Beat The GMAT - the MBA Social Network

I started my professional flight career as a flight instructor for a school specializing in aerobatics at John Wayne Airport, staying for a year until I had gained sufficient flight time to qualify for a job as an airline pilot. I moved to New York to accept a job flying for Piedmont Airlines based in LaGuardia. From there, I followed larger airplanes and better pay to Horizon Air in Portland, OR, where I was promoted to fly turbojet aircraft and loiter on a different side of the country.

Airline jobs are great if you like traveling. When you work, you travel; when you’re off, you travel. I took advantage of every 4+ day break to travel internationally because I had to, the deal was too good that I couldn’t afford not to: Free flights (save departure tax for overseas travel) on (almost) every airline, anytime (well…on standby that is!). I felt that my best personal development came from my multiple trips abroad and around fumbling through languages and customs.

On one such trip to Buenos Aires, I met a contract pilot who ended up helping me secure a contract to become an instructor for Pluna, the national airline of Uruguay, to support their fleet transition to fly the CRJ-900 (the same plane I had flown for Horizon Air). I left my airline job to move to Montevideo where I spent an amazing nine months learning how different the professional cultures are across 90 degrees of latitude and how to avoid sunburn the deadly combo of amazing beaches and a hole in the ozone layer.

Finally, with cash from my contract and no employer to give my time to, I started Simply Fly Aviation in one of the best cities that I never had the opportunity to live in: San Francisco. It’s been an enlightening, challenging, and very fun year and a half as a small business owner, and I am ready to get some formal business training during my MBA studies so that my next project can be even better!