NATA Industry Excellence Awards Continued from page 15 back. Marathon is a great place with wonderful world- class fishing experiences. The water is beautiful, and the people are great, come visit!” Distinguished Service Award: Don Campion Don Campion, President of Banyan Air Service and a former NATA Board Member, is the recipient of the NATA Distinguished Service Award. “When I got the phone call from NATA President Gary Dempsey telling me I’d be getting this honor, the first thing I told my team here was, ‘You’re out working 24/7 solving problems, towing hundreds of airplanes, wowing the customers, troubleshooting complex avionics and other challenges, and here I get the recognition!’ This is really living the dream,” Campion said. Campion co-founded Banyan Air in 1979 and now employs close to 200 teammates across seven aviation departments. His company has been ranked as one of the Best Places to Work by the South Florida Business Journal. He boasts that 55 percent of his employees have been with the company for more than five years, and 25 percent of them have been with the company more than 10 years. He says he likes to hire students right out of the aviation program at nearby Broward Community College and mentor them through promotion after promotion, as he did with Charles Amento, currently Director of MRO Services at Banyan Air, supervising a team of 50 technicians. “When I try to articulate for somebody what makes Banyan Air Service successful, I like to say we took a traditional organization chart and just turned it upside down,” Campion said. “It’s the people on the front line pumping fuel, repairing the airplanes, selling services, working in accounting that really know how to best serve 16 the customer. The key to our success is listening to our frontline people—line service, technical services, associ- ates in the pilot shop, our aircraft sales folks—and letting them dictate what our best practices should be and then documenting those operating procedures into the Banyan Way.” He similarly shares credit for his accomplishments from his time as an NATA Board Member: “That experience was quite exciting for me because I was able to be a part of this incredible body helping to shape our industry and the direction it’s going, and to have a voice for our industry as different regulations were being considered or challenged. Those on the Board are the shakers and movers of the industry, so it was a real privilege to better understand that side of the indus- try and to realize the importance of staying ahead of what might be transpiring in Washington to ensure that we’ve had a voice before regulations are put in place.” Campion credits his early love of aviation to his unique childhood as the son of medical missionary parents working in Nigeria. And he’s come full-circle. In recent years, he’s been returning to Egbe, Nigeria annu- ally—and bringing a Banyan Air teammate in each group he takes—to assist in rebuilding the hospital there. “I was born and raised in Nigeria,” he said. “As a child, when you were ready for Grade 1, these small aircraft— Piper Aztecs, Piper Comanches—would come land right beside the hospital on a grass strip and take us off to boarding school. It was a three-hour ride in a Comanche, versus what would have been a two-day drive in a jeep! That’s a big wow factor when you’re a little kid! I believe that is what truly planted the aviation seed in me.” He left Nigeria to enroll in a four-year technical pro- gram at Seneca College in Toronto, graduating with 250 hours of flight time and his commercial, multi-engine instrument rating, followed by a one-year Airframe & Powerplant course. Then, he moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida and got his first job, flying an Aztec back and forth to the Bahamas. “One of the first things I noticed on the job was that pilots with a passion to fly were the owners of little char- ter companies, and a lot of them were really struggling Aviation Business Journal | Summer 2019
