Come fly with me, or learn from my journey

Alex Guilbert sat down with LNN to share his journey toward becoming a pilot and flight trainer. It wasn’t an easy journey and required a great deal of determination, which began at a very young age.

He said, “Well, every summer, my family would fly from Montreal to Calgary and then down to Lethbridge because my mom’s parents lived in Raymond and then they moved to Lethbridge. So that’s why we kept coming back here.”

Guilbert continued, “Prior to 9-11 [in 2001], travellers were allowed in the cockpit, and on every single flight, my parents would say, ‘Go up and see the pilot’ — and it was always the Air Canada flights because that’s how it worked out. I can just remember a bunch of times, when either the first officer or the captain would say, ‘Come up here,’ and they would sit me on their lap and ask me, ‘Do you know what this gauge does, or this gauge, and that’s an altimeter, that shows our altitude?’”

“That was my initial instruction, and it was cool looking at the view. As a seven, eight, nine-year old kid, I thought it was amazing. Even now, as a young adult, I am still amazed at the sites I see on a regular basis from the flight deck,” he added.

That’s how it started for Guilbert. Then, when he was 12, he asked his parents if he could join the Royal Canadian Air Cadets.

Guilbert chuckled, “Obviously they agreed, because what parent doesn’t want their kid to go get some kind of discipline, learn how to shine shoes and tie a tie, and less stress later on Dad to teach their son that.”

“I did Air Cadets for seven years, starting off in Montreal, and then we moved to Lethbridge in 2006, and in my grade 12 year I left the Air Cadets and thought I was going to go into a medical field. Originally, I went to the U of L [University of Lethbridge] to study Kinesiology and management, but I wasn’t passionate about that whatsoever,” he said.

It was flying he had his sight set on. To that end, he went to work for a Lethbridge electrical company and saved up his money over the two years he was there.

“At the age of 19, I started flight school at the Lethbridge Airport. The Excel Flight school offers a really great program — the Professional Pilot Program — which takes you from zero hours to 200 hours, multi-engine, instrument flight rules rating, as well as your commercial pilot’s license.”

Alex Guilbert in Lethbridge in 2015, after passing his Commercial Pilot test. (Photo courtesy Alex Guilbert)

“After I finished in Lethbidge, I also went to Kelowna Airhart Aviation, where I got my float plane rating because that was something I wanted to try out and see if I liked it. It was a lot of fun, but no one was really hiring float pilots when I was looking. So, I went back to Excel Flight training and did the instructor rating to become a flight instructor. I got my first job in Fort McMurray in 2015, at the age of 22, teaching people how to fly, and from time-to-time I would do aerial tours of the oil sands sites, the town and the rivers and lakes in the area. Sometimes, guys would just want to go out to find a nice spot to go hunting. However, it was mostly just flight instruction for me,” Guilbert said.

Alex Guilbert as a flight instructor in Fort McMurray, Alberta. (Photo courtesy Alex Guilbert)

“Everything was great in Fort McMurray. I had a chance encounter with a fellow who was looking over an airplane at McMurray Aviation’s hangar. It was a Piper Aztec, which I used in Lethbridge to do my flight engine training. He was just checking out the plane for his boss, who needed someone to fly it down to where he was because he wasn’t used to flying in the winter time.”

Guilbert continued, “I got in touch with the plane’s new owner, who asked if I would be comfortable flying it down south. I said, ‘no problem, where am I flying it to?’ He chuckled and said, ‘Nassau, Bahamas’.”

“That was a little further than I had been but, I told him I would do it as it’s good experience, and as a pilot still in the beginning stages of my career, it’s all about the amount of flight hours you get. For me, this was going to be an extra 25 hours of multi-engine pilot and command time, which is the most sought-after time. On top of it, I got paid for dead-heading the plane, which was expenses and a daily rate.”

He said, “It took four days to fly the plane from Fort McMurray, jumping my way down to Nassau. First stop was Lethbridge to refuel and if there were any problems, I was at an airport that had Piper Aztecs. I then made pit stops at several U.S. airports for customs checks and further refuelling, then spent a week in the Bahamas to relax, before taking a commercial flight back home, just making it in time to find out Fort McMurray was being evacuated due to the forest fire.”

The Fort McMurray forest fire broke out in May 2016.

Guilbert said, “My boss at McMurray Aviation had me and other pilots stay at the hangars around-the-clock, just in case the fire got close to the airport, so that we could all fly the airplanes out, if needed. You know, when you run an aviation business and you don’t have planes, you’re not going to make any money.”

Guilbert said he stayed until one o’clock in the morning and watched while the fire got closer and closer. One of his students began to worry about his plane and asked him to fly it to safety.

Alex Guilbert in Fort McMurray. (Photo courtesy Alex Guilbert)

“So, I flew my student’s plane down to Edmonton. It was very surreal to take off — just to my right was a massive forest fire and then the black of night. Just flying south, I could see the entire highway from Fort McMurray all the way to Edmonton, lit right up with grid-lock traffic. It was quite the sight to see.”

Who was the student? Guilbert said, “He was an executive with Caterpillar equipment in Fort McMurray, who always wanted to be a pilot, so he bought his own airplane to do flight training on. He now lives in Arizona with his family.”

Another one of Guilbert’s students was a physician, who purchased a small aircraft with the intent of flying into remote northern communities to provide health care.

Being a trained and certified flight instructor at the age of 22, did it ever unnerve Guilbert that he was teaching people twice his age?

He said, “Well, it’s always a bit of a challenge to wrap your head around that. Some of the older guys that come in and see this young baby-faced instructor and wonder, ‘What the heck is this guy going to be able to teach me?’ However, we train to Transport Canada standards and if you pass your flight tests and written exams — and there are a lot of written exams — then you know what you’re doing. It doesn’t matter how old an instructor is or how much life experience they have or not.”

Guilbert concedes that he isn’t out of the ordinary. In the past few years, he’s heard of other people who have become flight instructors at 22. But, he admits, “I’m still very much a baby-faced first officer in the eyes of the public.”

When the Fort McMurray fire brought flight work to a halt, Guilbert went to work for King Air, providing medical air services throughout the Kivalliq and Baffin regions of Nunavut, as well as transporting patients down to Winnipeg and Ottawa. After more than a year of flights in the northern regions, he began flight duties with Air Canada Express. Guilbert said he was thrilled.

At the age of 27, Guilbert viewed his work with Air Canada as the final stage of his career. Being an international airline, Air Canada has several types of aircraft and offers diverse types of flying. Guilbert planned to work his way up to larger aircraft. Then COVID-19 hit.

“When I started with Air Canada, the aviation industry was doing well, but there was no end in sight as to how far COVID would go. Air Canada was still planning on hiring 800 or 900 pilots after I was hired, so I was thinking I got in at a good time. I would have a good seniority number and I was being trained on their new aircraft, the Airbus A220. I was one of the last new hires at Air Canada to be trained on that specific aircraft. After that, there was so much uncertainty. I had friends who were in their own courses for their own aircraft, who were told to just go home. Some of them were only two sessions away from having the type-rating for their licence to fly a specific aircraft. Unfortunately, necessity required that flights be reduced.”

Guildbert continued, “I’m very, very fortunate that I got to finish my training. It was a little tough at first, just staying motivated because I saw friends being taken out of their courses and I thought, ‘Will it be me next?’ However, the trainers said, ‘No, just keep going. You might get pulled, you might not’.”

“From the very start of my training, I already knew I would eventually be furloughed — a fancier way of saying laid off. However, I decided to keep going. It gave me something to do and kept my mind off the whole COVID situation. I was able to finish my course three days before by 28th birthday.”

As he expected, Guilbert was furloughed on June 30, 2020. However, when he was in his training, he had in his mind that the Airbus A220 was the newest airplane in the fleet, which meant the most senior people wouldn’t want to fly it because on the pay scale, it pays the least. So, with all the layoffs, they would have to eventually train more people on this airplane.

Guilbert said, “I spoke with the chief flight instructor and said if they needed any flight instructors, I was willing to come back on contract. I would do whatever it takes to stay in this industry. He said if the situation arose, he would let me know. And, sure enough, a month after I finished my type-rating I was notified that trainers were needed.”

“I had my resume ready and a perfect training record with Air Canada. I got the job — as a contractor.”

He had to start his own company, to train as a private contractor.

“The company is called Aroura Canada Aviation Services Incorporated or ACAS for short, which is a play on words for aircraft collision avoidance system.” Guilbert chuckled when explaining this and noted, “I’m a pilot, not a marketing person.”

“I began teaching Air Canada pilots how to fly the Airbus A220, taking me full circle because I think back to when I started at McMurray Aviation as a flight instructor after I got my instructor’s license. Now, I was teaching guys with umpteen times more experience than me on how to fly this airplane. All the candidates we have in the training program are all very sharp and very much in the books but, because it’s a newer system with a lot of screens and keyboards, it’s a little more intuitive for someone like me, who is a millennial and well versed in computer systems.”

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After spending about a year as a flight instructor with his own company and as the COVID situation eased travel restrictions, Guilbert got word that he would be called back to Air Canada as a pilot on March 6, 2022.

Any future training for Alex will simply involve learning how to pilot larger and larger aircraft. Once you get to that point, as far as Transport Canada is concerned, you get your 1500 hours of flying time, which is the minimum. You usually have a lot more than that by the time you get to your final license, which is the Airline Transport Pilot license. Once you get those hours, as well as some specific hours, such as night-time flying, along with two big written exams, then you just train on the next or newer types of aircraft that you will be piloting.

Guilbert said, “If it’s an Airbus 320, then you get that type rating license. If it’s a Boeing 777 or 737, then you get that licensing. This is one of the reasons air travel is still safer that driving. Every six months, pilots have to go back into the simulator for a type-rating valid for a specific aircraft, and if they don`t know their stuff, they can’t fly. We don’t get tested like this every time we buy a new vehicle!”

“It`s a bit stressful knowing that every six months you could get your name pulled off the line if you don`t know your stuff. It just keeps you in the books, continually studying. That’s why flying is the safest form of travel. It isn’t like driving a car where you just make sure to renew your licence before it expires and you’re fine. With pilots, you must know what to do for every situation.”

Guilbert explained, “It’s very rigorous training because they give you multiple different situations and scenarios, such as you’re taking off and as soon as you get past the point of no return, they will have an engine fail on you or give you an engine fire and it comes down to ‘What are you going to do?’ And you’re supposed to know exactly what you’re going to do in all of those situations.”

Alex Guilbert in the cockpit of an Airbus A220. (Photo courtesy Alex Guilbert)

Guilbert has already logged many more firsts in his career, including his first landing at LaGuardia Airport in New York this summer. If you happen to be on an Air Canada Airbus flight in western Canada, it’s possible Guilbert could be one of the pilots at the helm. Unfortunately, Air Transport rules do not allow flight deck visits anymore. However, you can follow Guilbert’s adventures on Instagram at @av8r_alex.

Read more Lethbridge News Now.

by Dori Modney

Come fly with me, or learn from my journey

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