Airbus Captain Marianne Cerutti had dedicated her whole life to aviation. The devoted aviator has spent nearly half of her life constantly improving her skills to reach the peak of professionalism in nearly 25 years of her career. The pilot says she has never imagined herself working in a different area. Even the Covid crisis could not rip off the aviation from the pilot‘s heart.
It has been almost a year since Marianne’s last flight as a Captain on the Airbus A320. After losing her job as a pilot at Aigle Azur, a French Paris-Orly based airline that collapsed in September 2019, Marianne was intensively looking for other opportunities to get back to the flight deck as soon as possible. Her career was supposed to continue at another commercial airline, but the pilot was invited to join a company on the verge of the Covid-crisis.
“I’m out of the skies for one year now. I was supposed to join another air carrier in March 2020, but my contract was canceled due to Covid. [The company] told me that it did not need me anymore, but it asked me to keep in touch giving hopes that I will have an opportunity to return,” Marianne explained.
All Marianne‘s ambitions turned out to be a house of cards but the experienced aviator decided not to waste her time. After primary grief and shock have diminished, instead of waiting for better days to come Marianne is enjoying moments with her relatives and family while on the ground. The Captain said that it was the first time in her whole 25-year career when she did not fly for “such a long time”.
“The summer of 2020 was the first season when I did not fly at all. I enjoyed the time with my family and all the people I didn’t see for a long time. I realized that there were no jobs for pilots at the time at all. Then I started to think creatively and […] now I am on my way to offer services for other pilots to help them to recover their skills and keep their licenses valid until the aviation recovers,” Marianne smiled.
Even though she had not had any experience in business development, the Captain managed to turn her positive mindset, a long-term aviator experience, and savings into a little pilot training business.
“I have spent about six months to turn the initial idea into a real business. My goal is to help the [pilot] community by organizing training in simulators and by facilitating the necessary documentation management process. […] My company is small at the moment and it is taking only the first steps into the training market. But I already see pilots’ interest in my service and I will continue working on it. I will not stop.”
The pilot believes that the industry is not ready to recover by full capacity yet, but she bets on travelers who are dying to get back on aircraft again as soon as it would be possible, meaning that pilots should be “in a perfect shape” for flying at any moment.
“I always say to my pilot friends to keep training, keep learning the procedures because at any time we should be ready to fly, ready for a real race for taking off to the skies. […] The vaccination is coming and that means that people have found a weapon to that disease. We found a solution and we will continue to fly, so we need to be ready for that.”