2000s

“I had great mentors and instructors who helped push me.”

Aviation grad on top of the world

Karl Chang

NO CORNER OFFICE HAS A BETTER VIEW than the cockpit of Karl Chang’s airplane.

“I have a 180-degree view from my office and it changes constantly with clouds, scenery and mountains,” says the Aviation grad and Sunwing Airlines Captain. “That’s the best part about flying. It never gets old.”

After first graduating from York University with a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology, Karl took a fulltime job with York. A year later, though, he realized he wanted more.

“At the end of the day, I was stuck in an office,” he recalls. “I thought, was that what I wanted?”

Quitting his job, Karl found his way to Seneca’s Aviation and Flight Technology program (now Honours Bachelor of Aviation Technology). While at Seneca, Karl was president of the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute student club. He graduated valedictorian of his class in 2004.

Karl’s academic success aside, it was a chance meeting at Seneca’s former Buttonville Campus that launched his career as a pilot. During his first year, Karl was asked to give an airline president from China a tour of the hangar—in Mandarin.

“I was nervous, I wasn’t even supposed to be there that day,” says Karl, who was born in Canada and spoke conversational Mandarin. “Then he asked what I wanted to do when I finished the program. I said, ‘I want to go to China and work for you.’”

Karl kept in touch with the executive over the next two years. Upon graduation, and without formal arrangements, he spent $1,800 for a flight to Beijing, where the two met on a Sunday. An hour later, Karl was offered a job to fly a Boeing 737 with Okay Airways, China’s first private airline. At the time, he was among a handful of foreign-trained pilots ever hired to fly in China.

“I was like, ‘Where can I sign?’ It was what I was looking for,” Karl says. “If it weren’t for this connection, which happened at Seneca, I’d have headed north. A lot of my classmates had to do that to put in the flight time required before a pilot can apply to major airliners.”

Karl spent five years in China, returning to Toronto in 2009, becoming a first officer and then captain with Porter Airlines. Since 2013, he has been with Sunwing, where he’s also an instructor for the Flight Operations Department, training new recruits. Through Sunwing’s European deployment program, he has worked out of bases in Dublin, Belfast, Warsaw and Norwich.

“Seneca provided the building blocks of my career,” Karl says. “I had great mentors and instructors, who helped push me in the direction to become a commercial pilot.”