Katherine Abbott - Commercial Pilot
This is the first in an ongoing series of profiles in which we talk to Catholic lay people in the diocese about their job in light of the call of the laity to “consecrate the world itself to God, everywhere offering worship by the holiness of their lives” (Lumen Gentium). Although I’ve only been working as a pilot for maybe six years I feel like I’ve had my head in the clouds since I was old enough to reach the rudder pedals. When I was about 6 or 7 years old I went for a flight with a family friend. I absolutely loved it, and from then on became absolutely plane crazy: pilots talk about “catching the bug”. I remember saying to our friend that when I grew up I wanted to be a pilot like him, and he said, “Girls are flight attendants.” Well, stroppy little six-year-old me wasn’t having that - I wanted to be up the front driving. During high school I tried to get as much flight time as I could beg, borrow or steal from friends with planes, using Christmas and birthday pocket money to pay my way. Flying in a light aircraft is around $300 an hour so it’s not cheap. When I was 17 I left school halfway through the year to go to flight school, so I was flying around the country by myself at the age of 18. Flight school was amazing, doing something difficult when you love it feels really easy. The hard bit wasn’t the training, which was a blast (God bless student loans), 09
the tough bit was finding a job after graduation. I was a fully qualified commercial pilot but I couldn’t get a job in New Zealand. That was my time in the desert so to speak: I worked as a hospital orderly, lived at home, scraped enough money together to go to Australia, and got a job with a small flight school in Perth, teaching people to fly. I earned below minimum wage in that first job, so little I didn’t even have to pay tax. Long hours, cold mornings pulling planes out, or hot days stuck with no air-con in that flying glasshouse, flight test after flight test. (People think being a pilot is really glamorous - they haven’t talked to a pilot about this stuff!) I enjoyed it, but it was hard work. It got my hours up - to get a job with an airline you need about a thousand flying hours and you come out of flight school with about three hundred - and then I applied for jobs back home as soon as I could, and got a job straight away: I’m a first officer (the other pilot in the plane is a captain) and I’ve been with this airline for about three years. I absolutely love it, getting to do what I love for a job, and the hard times were worth it. Waking up at 4am is kind of standard. You get up before the sun, get dressed, pack some lunch and head to work. We get to the airport and check the weather and see what kind of fuel we want to load the aircraft up with, then get out and check the aircraft and make sure it’s all good to fly. While we’re doing our loading up of the computers we get the passengers on, and once they’re all on we check
