SWISS Business: LUX – ZRH – LPA
6. February 2024Showers at the airport
14. March 2024There are some great coincidences in life.
This is one of them. In 2018, I took a 6-month sabbatical and decided to spend it on Gran Canaria. For the first two months, I lived in Las Palmas, attended a language school and stayed in their "student accommodation".
One evening, someone tried to unlock my door with a key - which of course didn't work. I opened the door and there stood my neighbor: telephoning with one hand, a bag tucked under her arm and trying to unlock the door with the other one.
That's how we got to know each other: Claudia was also at the language school for 2 weeks - but in a different class. Now that we knew each other, we went out together in the evenings or with other students from the language school.
In the 4 months that followed, I lived in Playa de Ingles, where she flew down for a few days.
We did her first photo shoot there. I already knew that her big dream was to fly and that she already had the license and lots of practice for single-propeller engine planes ("Cesna" and such).
After that I only heard that she was looking for an airline for the "Commercial Pilot License" training. And then there was really no more contact. But that's the way it is.
Thanks to her Instagram posts, I then found out that she had successfully completed this training in 2022 and should now be 1st Officer at Air Baltic.
January 2024 came the great surprise: "Hey, are you in Gran Canaria right now? Because I have a layover there these days!"
Unfortunately I wasn't, but in February we were down there at the same time and were able to see each other again.
Before that, I had a look at the Air Baltic website and found the pages of the airline calendar in the in-flight magazine, where the airline's employees were portrayed. And hey, who was pictured in December with an Airbus A220 in the background? Guess!
We spent a day together enjoying the beautiful weather and were catching up on what's been happening since 2018. In the afternoon we did a photot shoot with a horse and my best (photographer) friend on GC.
It turned out that our first shoot was the catalyst for her modeling career resulting in many shoots and workshop bookings.
Thanks to this it was a lot easier for her to raise the money for the pilot training. I was all the more pleased because she is a very likeable person who (still) has great goals in life and I am sure that she will achieve them.
Now that we will probably be in contact more often, the plan is for me to let her fly me in the A220. Maybe I'll even get to say hello in the cockpit.
And I'm curious to find out more about what it's like to work as a pilot.
Claudia:
https://www.flying-claudia.com
https://www.instagram.com/flying_claudia_/
Rolf:
