Your Job Makes Me Jealous ✈ Kurt Jahr, 26, is an Air Canada Jazz pilot

Aviation careers start with long days at low pay 

By Josh Dehaas

Your Job Makes Me Jealous is a weekly podcast with a young Canadian whose career is so neat that people at parties crowd around to hear about it. We talk about the ups, the downs and the pay. 

For this inaugural podcast, I interviewed Kurt Jahr, a 26 year-old from Markham, Ont. who landed his dream job flying for Air Canada Jazz out of Toronto’s Pearson Airport. He started in January.

Jahr got the job was after paying his dues in Gander, Nfld. and Timmins, Ont. He’s been flying since age 14 and earned a Bachelor of Business Administration in Aviation & Operations Management at the University of New Brunswick in 2007.

Click here to listen to the podcast with Air Canada Jazz pilot Kurt Jahr (4:48)

The transcript: 

What was your first job like?

I was employed by Capital Airways and Capital Airways is who I did my training with. They’re coupled with the University of New Brunswick. I worked the ramps, I cleaned planes, I fueled planes, I worked the hangar. I worked as dispatch and then I got to fly, maybe a couple hours every week.

I moved on to instructing a couple months after that, I moved to Gander Newfoundland where I had to teach people how to fly. Same thing. You’re making maybe $25,000 per year and you’re working 12 to 14 hour days, so there’s a lot of work in it. But what you’re basically trying to do is build your hours, get experience for that next job, build experience for your next job and eventually make it up to the airlines.

 Read more here:   http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2012/08/15/kurt-jahr-26-is-an-air-canada-jazz-pilot/