Dan Cummins: Transformed by flight

Dan Cummins’ first professional gig as a pilot probably couldn’t have been any better. “On the first day, it’s thirty degrees, I kick off the flip flops and fly barefoot,” he tells Coastlines, about his inaugural years in the cockpit with Maldivian Air. “And it’s great.”

“I’m probably one of the luckiest guys out there,” the 40-year-old Captain continues. “A lot of the guys had to work up north on the dock for a year or two and really put in their time. But I bugged the chief pilot over there in the Maldives Dan Cummins found his calling as a pilot
(Photo by Harbour Air Ltd.)and racked up what must have been five hundred dollars in phone calls. I bugged him for about six months…”

Aside from the apprenticeship spent in a Southern Asian tropical paradise, Cummins is a bit of a late bloomer when it comes to getting himself in the cockpit, as compared to many of his Harbour Air colleagues.

While he admits that aviation exerted an early fascination—“My grandparents lived in a coastal town called Ocean Falls and I used to fly up there every year as a kid, and that’s when I fell in love with flying,” he recalls—it wasn’t until he was 30 that Cummins “got his act together”, as he puts it.

Prior to that, the New Westminster native worked in a jam manufacturing plant and did his fair share of weekend carousing. A subsequent few years in a paper mill were lucrative but unhappy. While it may have been an abysmal experience, he says “it helped me pay for my licenses and to travel. Then I met my wife and it kind of worked out for me.”

It wasn’t long after that Cummins went from a self-confessed “party guy” to family man, homeowner and professional. Even his old friends were evidently shocked by the transformation. “When we went back to my twentieth grad reunion, most people were surprised that I’d become a pilot.”

After a beat, he admits, “’Cause I was a bit of a maniac in high school…”

With those wild days well and truly behind him, Cummins now lives with his wife Diane and their two sons in a 100-year-old house they’ve been renovating for some five years, and he plays a little lacrosse on the weekends—all in his hometown of New Westminster.

“Everybody knows everybody here,” he chuckles, about the 150-year-old former capital of BC. “A good friend of mine, and a guy I play lacrosse with, his mom grew up in this house. His mom actually comes over and checks out what we’ve done with it.”

Cummins insists he’s here to stay, stating, “All my friends are back here, with kids, and homes, and all that,” but he’s happy to admit that there are some things he still misses.

“I flew for the first year and a half in bare feet,” he laughs. “When I got back to Canada I had to wear boots. That felt really weird to me.”