26-year-old Māris becomes airBaltic first-year co-pilot: from a school expo to the cockpit

Māris Maikls Mitrevics, a 26-year-old second pilot (first officer) at Latvia's national airline airBaltic, spoke to the news portal Jauns.lv about his path into the pilot profession. His account shows that getting into the job requires a major investment, while the pay is substantial: a second pilot earns several thousand euros. The cost of training itself is also very high.

Early beginnings

Māris recalls that as a small child he liked being above ground level. He climbed on windowsills, and his favourite place for an afternoon nap was a closed piano. At the time he did not connect this with aviation, but his grandmother later told him she had understood right away that, once he chose this profession, everything had been leading to it.

Education fairs at Ķīpsala

Māris had always been interested in aviation, but he began to think about becoming a pilot when he and his friends visited education fairs at the Ķīpsala exhibition complex in Riga. Schoolchildren attended them in a nominally voluntary but in practice compulsory way. At first, being a pilot seemed distant and unrealistic to him; he thought the world was shown to Latvians by foreigners.

During his school years Māris learned that it was possible to study to become a pilot. Each year at the Ķīpsala fair he met representatives of the airBaltic Pilot Academy. He recalls that his eyes lit up. To get into the academy later, he worked on developing various skills.