Travelling has taken on a whole new meaning for a former Knights basketball star.
Okotokian and former Holy Trinity Academy Knights hoopster Elena-Brown Hozjan’s aviation career has recently taken flight after being hired on as a first officer, also known as a co-pilot, with Sunwing Airlines last fall.
“It’s still magical,” she said. “I feel super lucky that this is essentially my first job out of graduation. I was thinking about it the other day while I had a layover in Punta Cana, ‘Wow, this is my job, that doesn’t seem right.’”
Since December, she’s been flying the line with training captains which will be the case for the first 60 sectors she works before being released to fly with any captain.
“It’s super valuable experience and coming from flying Cessnas, little four-seater planes, up to a 737 it’s definitely useful to have the extra time with trainers,” said Brown-Hozjan, now based out of Waterloo, Ont.
Her trips have taken her to many destinations in the Caribbean and Mexico and to perhaps, less exciting locales north of the 49th parallel.
“I’ve seen a lot of Cancun, lots of Cuba, we fly to five different places in Cuba, the Dominican,” she said. “Sometimes it’s like 20 minutes in the sun, but I’ll take it.”
Brown-Hozjan starred on the HTA senior basketball team from 2015-17 and pursued the game at the post-secondary level.
The forward was training with the University of Calgary Dinos team and originally planning to study kinesiology before following her true passion of aviation.
She was training with the Dinos during her planned gap year in preparation to join the team the following season.
“It was pretty much five days a week and also coaching the summer camps the Dinos do every year, it was super busy, and somewhere along there I just realized it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing,” she said. “I just felt like my heart wasn’t into basketball any more and that was the main reason I was going into U of C at all.
“I did always want to be a pilot, trace back 10 years prior to that, I always had it as a dream. You ask my childhood friends and it’s all I talked about from the ages 10 to 15…I realized along the way with the Dinos that was more what I wanted to do.”
She then landed on the University of Waterloo’s four-year aviation program in 2019, studying both theory and practice in geography and aviation. She has earned private, commercial and flight instructor licences.
“The first few (Sunwing) flights were super nerve-racking and I still get nervous, but it’s definitely a cool feeling,” she said. “At first, I didn’t want to think about the fact there were 200 passengers behind me, it’s still just a plane and it very much is.
“It’s just a lot more technical and a lot of automation that you have to learn to manage, it’s definitely different. But the biggest thing that helped me going through Sunwing’s simulator training was remembering that it’s just a plane, the fundamentals are still there and my hand-flying got a lot better when I realized that.”
The takeoff, particularly the ones that take you out of bad weather into sunny skies above the clouds, is among the favourites parts of her job.
“Or if it’s a sunrise,” she said. “And that often happens because we have a lot of early morning departures and people always say it’s the best office view in the world and it’s true.
“It’s pretty neat.”
She said there are several traits developed from athletics that cross over to working as a pilot, from interpersonal skills, learning to work with an array of different personalities to learning how to take constructive feedback.
“Having gone through sports, it was so much easier to take that feedback whether it be from my instructors when I was learning to fly or even now at Sunwing,” she said.
“You’re going to have bad days where you’re not as sharp as you should be and you’re going to get a little bit of a talking down from captains and being able to take that feedback and do something productive with it and use it to fuel you to get better, those are all things I learned playing basketball.”
The learning continues as a first officer and Brown-Hozjan is in no rush to move one seat over.
“There’s so much to learn before you want to upgrade to captain,” she said. “I do love teaching so, ultimately, I’d like to be a training captain and be able to help the next generation of pilots.
“Many, many years down the road I’d like to take on a role like that, but for now I’m very content being a keen student, studying systems on my days off. It’s still a ton to learn.”
