Miles Anderson said he fell in love with aviation long before he was old enough to participate in it.
“I grew up beside an airport in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and from the roof of one of my best friend's house, you could actually see the entire airport,” he recounts.
Today, Anderson is the director of maintenance (DOM) of two Part 135s: MindWinder Aviation and NorCal Aero. He was named DOM at the age of 25.
“Our primary operations are in firefighting, so it's not your typical 135. We don't usually have any scheduled flights, minus the jet proving runs that we're doing now with the FAA. We act as the air attack role for the US Forest Service and sometimes CALFIRE, and my role is to manage, maintain, and schedule fleet maintenance for all the aircraft that we operate for fire purposes. In addition, we have a few aircraft that act as line maintenance mules for AOG operations,” Anderson described.
As the DOM for these operators, Anderson's role runs the gamut.
“My role is to maintain the paperwork, correspondence, and the physical maintenance of the aircraft. Sometimes I'm the avionics guy, sometimes the maintenance guy, and occasionally the pilot. We're quite lean here, so it takes a special set of people at our organization to have a good, well-rounded set of skills and the ability to adapt, but we're all one team here and everybody does a bit of everything,” he said.
Miles received his Bachelors in Aviation Maintenance Science at Embry-Riddle in Daytona, Florida. He then went into their accelerated program, which didn’t exist at the time but the school helped craft it with Anderson, to receive his Master’s in Business Administration from the Embry-Riddle College of Business.
“What I like the most about what I do is having the ability to really take pride in your work. Not only do it, but to have the control from start to finish. Being in the role that I'm in, I can control what it looks like in my mind, and how I would like to see it from start to finish, as well as the goals for a maintenance organization or a maintenance department for a 135, it's been amazing,” Anderson said.
