Hey there future Pilots, my name is Jody and I’d like to tell you about the exciting journey I’ve been through in order to get to where I am now flying a Boeing 767 for Atlas. I grew up playing Ice hockey thinking I would be playing in the majors, until injuries caused an early retirement where I spent years trying to find my career path which involved many jobs, such as Personal Training, Warehouse work, Coin grading, and much more that I won’t bore you with.
It was 2017 and I was working in an office at a desk for a hockey brand when I realized that I wanted to fly airplanes for a living. I always wanted to become a pilot after high school but never thought that it could become a reality until I visited my brothers’ apartment when his roommate, who was the pilot for a local parachuting company, recommended that I go try a discovery flight. I remember going up on my discovery flight where the instructor let me fly around and have some fun, but I’ll never forget what was branded in my mind after that day, “I can get paid to fly airplanes instead of paying to fly an airplane?!?”.
I immediately signed up and did whatever I could do to finance my lessons whether it was getting a second job, getting personal loans, credit cards, or partial pilot loans in order for me to crawl slowly through obtaining my certificates (Private, Instrument, Commercial, Instructor). I then received my first official job as a Certified Flight Instructor in 2019 at Riverside Flight Academy and quit my desk job for a new adventure in the sky. I flew 9-5 five days a week in all different types of aircraft, meeting tons of great people while seeing all sorts of amazing places all over southern California.
I learned so much as a flight instructor and obtained my CFII and my multi Commercial rating directly through Johan himself! I was there for a year and had accumulated the flight time needed for the Airlines very quickly but the Covid epidemic struck, which delayed my entry into the Airlines for almost a year. Even though the airlines were down I luckily still had employment as a Flight Instructor where I was accumulating a massive amount of flight time!
I finally got my first job as a jet pilot in 2021 flying a Citation XLS jet for a corporate private jet company out of the John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana. There I flew as a first officer for less than a year before I was upgraded to Captain and got to travel not only the country but exotic places in Mexico and Canada. Quickly after my time flying corporate jets I was hired by Atas Air and was given the opportunity to become a first officer on a Boeing 767! This is where I am now at 31 years old traveling awesome places around the world with fantastic coworkers. I occasionally have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming while I’m flying over 500 mph at 41,000 feet in the sky and can’t imagine myself doing anything else but being a Pilot.
