Bombardier Pilot – Virginia

In the fall of 2023, Aaron Griffith was a military pilot who had made the transition to civilian flying and needed work.  At the same time, JetPro Pilots was looking for an experienced aviator for a Washington, D.C.-based corporate client.

You can guess what happened next.

The networking and expertise that support business aviation are substantial and significant.  JetPro has gained a reputation for providing top-quality crews for its customers, and pilots like Aaron are now aware that when JetPro calls, it pays to listen.

“JetPro Pilots provides great capability to connect a vast network of pilots with both short-term and long-term employment,” Aaron said in a recent interview. “The power of JetPro Pilots is not only its back end — in terms of their recruiting and their long-term staffing — but also its short-term staffing, the ability to work with folks from all parts of the aviation community.”

Today, Aaron is a full-time first officer handling Bombardier Global 6500 aircraft from a base in suburban D.C. He has held those duties since November 2023. 

“I like to tell people that the company pays me to sit around, at my home or in a hotel, essentially 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long, ready to go at a moment’s notice, whenever they might need me,” he laughed. “I just fly for free because I enjoy that part of it.”

That enjoyment began in scenic Klamath Falls, Oregon, where Aaron grew up. “We had an Air National Guard base there, so I got to watch F-4s and F-16s and later F-15s come and go all day long,” he recalls. “And that got me really interested in becoming a pilot. When I was 11 years old — on literally the day I was allowed to join —I joined the Civil Air Patrol. I was a member of the cadet program until I left for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, with an Air Force ROTC scholarship, to study computer science.”

Four years later, Aaron had his degree and a commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Force. He trained as a fighter pilot but found he was more comfortable with the teamwork model of transport crews.  Flying variants of the Lockheed C-130, he was involved in search-and-rescue operations as well as flight training in command positions at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Late in his career, he flew communications missions in Afghanistan at the controls of an Air Force E-11A, the militarized version of Bombardier’s Global Express.  When he retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in late 2020, he knew he wanted to be flying similar ultra long-range jets for business travel.

When his initial civilian employer unexpectedly passed away in 2023, Aaron became available.  JetPro Pilots chief recruiter Seth Roberts got wind of that and looked him up.

“I got a phone call from Seth within about 30 days of that unfortunate event transpiring,” Aaron recalled. “He said an organization was looking to hire in the Washington, D.C., area. So my wife Rachel and I made the leap from Albuquerque to Northern Virginia to join this organization at Seth’s behest, and we’ve been here almost two years now.”

It has been a smooth transition to their new circumstances for both Aaron and Rachel, who is a pediatric emergency physician in the Fairfax, Virginia, area.

“The company Seth found for me was going from a fleet of two or three airplanes to a fleet of four and needed to hire three more pilots,” Aaron concluded. “So Seth reached out to three of us and brought us on. It was quite a fortuitous event. However he managed this, he is definitely a craftsman in his career field. He knows what he’s doing.”