Katherine Abbott: This is why I get up at 4am
WRITTEN BY:
As told to Samuel Harris
Read Time
7 mins
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), 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 all the weights with the baggage guys, close up and then take off, getting in the air to wherever we’re going.
I fly the smaller planes - the Bombardier Q300 - so I get to fly into the smaller airports, anywhere between Kerikeri and Invercargill. My favourite airport to fly into is home - Tauranga. When I started the job, staying in really nice hotels and so on, I’d ask other pilots what their favourite overnight was and they’d say, “Home,” and I didn’t really understand it. But now it’s sometimes like the hotels, as nice as they are, are a kind of “four-star prison” - nothing beats flying home to your own bed. My second favourite airport would be Hokitika because that’s where my parents are, and sometimes they come out to the airport to see me, which is a proud moment for them to see their daughter flying in.
I get to work with a really great group of people. The captains are great (it’s not the old boys club that you see in movies and so on) and I’m a similar age to most of the flight attendants so I get on well with them. The atmosphere is really good, especially at the moment with Covid - we’re all looking after each other.
Covid kind of forced me to let go because I put so much importance, so much identity on my job, but I realised that actually the most important part of me is that I’m a child of God. As amazing as my job is, it’s more amazing that God loves me.
I became Catholic at 19: a friend invited me along to church and something just clicked and I had to find out more. By the time I’d been in RCIA for a couple of weeks I couldn’t turn back. I’d caught the bug - I was hooked, just as much as I was hooked on flying.
There’s kind of an unspoken rule not to talk about politics, money or religion on the flight deck, but depending on who you’re flying with, you can push that a bit. I’m not going to hide from it - if someone says, “What did you do on the weekend?” I’ll say, “I went to Mass,” and so on. Sometimes the witness is just being an all-round nice person, working well with your co-workers, doing the job professionally: living in the world but yet apart from it, being a saint in ordinary life. I picked my career without God in mind and then when I went through RCIA at 19 it made me feel really guilty that I wasn't a nun or looking after the poor or something a bit more obviously helpful to the world, but if this recent pandemic has taught me anything, it’s just how important family and friends are - those in-person, face-to-face connections. My aircraft type alone transports, on average, the entire population of New Zealand in passenger numbers a year. I've lost count of how many people I've flown from A to B but If I can get them there safely to see their best friend they haven't seen in ages, or to their next job interview or business meeting or family holiday, or perhaps just home to Mum and Dad for the weekend, I know I'm doing God's work.
People are interested in my job, and often have a hundred questions. Sometimes I have a bit of a joke with people when they ask what I do, just saying, “I work for an airline,” and they’ll say, “Ah, a flight attendant”. That stereotype is still out there even though it’s becoming more and more common for women to be pilots. I love it when there’s a little girl who says, “Are you the pilot?” and you can see her little brain trying to compute it when you say, “Yes, I am!”
Some people say, “I’m a nervous flier, tell me about this or that,” and I just reply that we absolutely love the job - don’t tell the airline, but we’d do it for free! - so if you’re scared of flying, don’t be. We love it, it’s our favourite place to be, we’re highly trained and we’ll get you where you’re going safely.
I’ve got so many photos of incredible sunrises and sunsets. Sometimes you wake up early thinking, “Ugh, I don’t want to go to work today,” but the view we get up there is one of the best perks of the job. You just think, “Oh, this is great, this is why I get up at 4am,” as you sit there at 20000 feet watching a beautiful sunrise.
Photographs supplied by Katherine Abbott.
