From Cabin Aide to Gulfstream IV Pilot Continued from page 29 that very moment, I truthfully hadn’t. But he started to explain the whole ordeal. He told me, ‘The first thing you need to do is take a discovery flight, basically a short introductory lesson to try to get you hooked on flying and see if you want to give it a real go.’” The pilots she’d been working with as a cabin aide set everything up for her discovery flight. She recalled, “I get in this small training aircraft and, as we start to taxi out, I’m looking out the window thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m sitting in front,’ and as soon as we leave the ground it clicks: this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. By the time we’re flying over the beach I’m totally sold. It was all very clear in that moment.” In early 2015, less than one year after completing her Corporate Flight Attendant Training for the cabin aide job at Journey Aviation, Kazmierczak started flight train- ing in a Cessna 172 at North Perry Airport to earn her private pilot license. “I was still working full-time as a cabin aide for Journey in the beginning, through the first year, doing flight train- ing on the days I was home,” she said. “By October 2015, I had my private pilot certificate, and that’s when I put together that, if I really wanted to move through the rat- ings and actually make it my career, then I couldn’t do it while also working as a cabin aide. I left Journey with the intention of getting all my flight training done and hope- fully coming back some day; and left it at that.” By 2016, she’d added her Instrument Rating (Part 141), Commercial Single Engine, and Certified Flight Instructor certificates from Palm Beach Flight Training, flying a Cessna 172 G1000, Cutlass 172RG, and Cessna 182 from Palm Beach County Airport, and also knocked out her Commercial Multiengine rating, flying a Beechcraft Duchess from Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. She wants others—especially other women—to understand that it’s an entirely attainable goal. 30 “Along the way I started working as an instructor at FXE while I was building my hours, and I was learning a lot from instructing, too. It really teaches you a lot, teaching somebody else to fly,” she explained. “I was loving that job so much that I nearly lost sight of the mission. Out of the blue, I get a call from Captain Chris Blough, the same pilot who’d first asked me if I’d ever considered being a pilot, and he’s asking me how many hours I have. By then I’d surpassed the hours required to work for Journey. And so, in a little less than four years altogether after he’d first put the idea in my head, I was able to come back to Journey to fly as a First Officer.” Kazmierczak thinks she’s been more than fortunate upon her return to Journey. In November 2018, she got her type rating for the Gulfstream IV, and by December 2018 she was flying the very same GIV aircraft she’d flown in on her first day as a Cabin Aide, back in 2014. “Here I was, taking a seat at the controls in the same cockpit that had first awed me,” she said. “It blows my mind that it all worked out like I’d wanted it to in my wildest dreams. It felt like coming back home to family.” Kazmierczak is eager to share the story of her transi- tion from Cabin Aide to First Officer because she hopes to inspire other people, who may have other careers in aviation, to follow her path, and because she wants oth- ers—especially other women—to understand that it’s an entirely attainable goal. Aviation Business Journal | Summer 2019
