Flight School Opportunity Webinar Excerpt – Transcript
Paula Williams – We’ll introduce Captain David Santo who has been waiting patiently, and you’re in Michigan today, are you Dave?
David Santo – I sure am, Paula.
Paula Williams – Fantastic. We’re really glad to have you here today. You might want to tell us a little bit about your career. I know you’re an airline pilot, and you absolutely love it.
David Santo – I am. Thank you, Paula, and thanks once again for organizing the seminar. To you and to John both, I greatly appreciate all of your efforts. It’s been great to work with you. I’m sitting here looking at the introductory slide, and I’ve got to update that picture because that’s false advertising. That’s about 10 years old now, and I’ve got a lot more gray hair than that.
Paula Williams – You look fantastic.
David Santo – I am indeed an airline captain. I’m an A320 captain for a major US airline. I’ve actually worked for five different 121 airlines over my career and a handful of 135 and corporate organizations as well. It’s been a pretty well-rounded career. I’ve done passenger airlines now. I’ve done cargo operations in worldwide transport flying 747s. I’ve flown Lears and Citations, some airplanes that maybe some folks haven’t heard of like Hansa jets and turbine Beech 18s. It’s been an absolutely fabulous career for me so far and I’m only in the middle of it. I’m looking forward to a long career still ahead of me.
Paula Williams – That’s fantastic and I think there’s been a lot of noise lately about how, especially in the US, a lot of people are unhappy with an airline career and for different reasons and things like that. I think you show a different side of that coin and show that it really can be a fantastic career if you’re in the right place and the right time and if you just basically follow a path that is smart about how you do that.
David Santo – I think you’re right, Paula. So many people are very concerned on the blogs about the experience that they’ve had in their career. I can honestly tell you the experience that people have had in the last 15 and 20 years has been very challenging. We have to be sympathetic, even empathetic, to the fact it has been a very tough environment for the last 20 years.
It’s also a cyclic industry meaning that when you have a downturn for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. The reaction right now is that we are going into what’s projected to be a 20-year boom in the industry. We can’t take the past, last 20 years experience and say this is what the industry is going to be like, it won’t be. It’s going to be much better in the future and that’s what’s really an exciting message for us is to convey that we’re getting into a very good time in aviation.
