They soon found they shared another passion: aviation.
From those shared interests have grown a business that has become a one-stop shop for pilots, Air-Mods Flight and Service Center at the Trenton-Robbinsville Airport on Sharon Road. It has led to a shared life as well: Mathiesen and Campbell, his fiancé, co-own the company, which offers a broad range of aircraft services, from airplane repairs to flight instruction to all ages in the Robbinsville area and beyond.
“We all go home to the same place at night, but I run the flight school, and he runs the maintenance shop,” Campbell said.
“A lot of people that have flight schools don’t have on-site maintenance. I don’t know how anybody would do it,” Mathiesen said. “If anyone sees something before they start flying that they’re unsure about, they can just walk in here.”
Mathiesen grew up working on mechanics, tinkering with a minibike when he was 6 years old. He studied mechanics in vocational high school and was recruited by Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology for aircraft maintenance in 1980. He started at the airplane maintenance shop working for a previous owner in 1983, then opened Air-Mods himself in Old Bridge in 1991. Eventually he outgrew that space, he said, which pushed him to open Air-Mods in Robbinsville in 2003.
“I love turning wrenches, and this is the cleanest way to do it,” said Mathiesen, who has been in aviation mechanics for 33 years. “I did cars and motorcycles and all that stuff for a long time. It’s messy. This is a lot cleaner.”
Mathiesen and Campbell, both from Jackson, met when Mathiesen’s daughter Melissa and Campbell’s daughter Ilissa Skinner, became best friends in elementary school. Mathiesen had been divorced for many years; Campbell was widowed, and each has four children from previous marriages ranging in age from 13 to 34.
Campbell, whose parents served in the Air Force, was a lieutenant in the Civil Air Patrol when Mathiesen asked her if she wanted to work in the maintenance shop. That led to her opening her own flight school, Campbell said.
“When I was working in the maintenance shop, there was a flight school already here, but the owner retired and they closed,” Campbell said. “Finally my kids were old enough to the point where I could be out more, so I decided to open up my own school.”
At the same time, the friendship was growing between Mathiesen and Campbell, and when Melissa and Ilissa graduated from Jackson Memorial High School in 2007, their parents began dating, Skinner said.
The maintenance shop offers customers everything from annual airplane inspections to upholstery and carpet refurbishment, and customers come from as far north as Maine and as far south as Alabama to have their aircraft serviced there, Mathiesen said.
Accredited by the Flight School Association of North America, the flight school opened its doors in 2008 with no airplanes, and they did a lot of ground school the first couple of weeks, Campbell said.
“I went from zero to 14 aircraft,” she said. “I have five smaller aircraft now, all the way up to a 10-passenger airplane, which is my personal station wagon, and even in that, we can’t fit all of our kids.”
The flight school employs certified instructors who assist students in getting their pilot’s license. It also offers AeroCamp, a three-year-old program geared toward middle and high school students to allow them to explore aviation and aerospace for a week during the summer.
The first day begins with educating the students about the airplane’s instruments and teaching them the aviation phonetic alphabet, ending with a discovery flight where the children are at the controls with an instructor, Campbell said. By the end of the program, students fly with an instructor an hour each way to the naval aviation museum in Cape May.
Skinner, 25, who manages the flight center, said they also did relief flights after Hurricane Sandy to donate supplies to those in need of assistance.
“It was crazy. I had people coming from everywhere in town,” she said.
Campbell said when customers came in to get an oil change, she loaded their airplanes with donated supplies and told them to drop them off in Tuckerton and Staten Island. One Saturday morning, she returned to Air-Mods from a relief flight she made to find a huge horse trailer in their parking lot.
“Three men from Ridge Spring, South Carolina, parked a trailer in the middle of their small town on a Wednesday and by Friday, it was filled,” she recalled. “They said they had been through it and the whole nation helped them, so they wanted to help here. One of my customers took them on a flight to the shore to see where their stuff was going.”
Skinner said the men probably heard about their efforts on the 101.5 radio station or knew someone from the area.
Being in the aviation industry has its advantages, especially when planning vacations, the family said. Mathiesen said they rarely fly commercially, and as long as the seats are full, it is about the same price.
When planning a recent trip, Campbell said they just headed south until they found palm trees, and they decided to land on a small island in the Bahamas.
“When you have an airplane, the world gets a lot smaller,” Mathiesen said.
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