Mick Egan: Living the dream

Mick Egan remembers the jets and helicopters that used to fly over his family home in Nowra, Australia, just south of Sydney. Like many of Harbour Air’s team of experienced aeronauts, it was this childhood fascination that determined the course of his life.

“I always used to think Father Christmas came in a helicopter, not with his reindeer,” he chuckles. “That’s when it started, when I was about six or seven.”

Mick’s family was Navy. His father was a physical trainer at the Royal Australian Navy air station near Nowra, and Mick’s own interest led to a stint in the R.A.N. after he graduated from high school. While there, Mick took a pilot’s course that led to a crop dusting gig once he returned to civilian life after seven years.

Mick Egan turned a vacation into a new
career (Nick Salvador)“I spent 3000 hours spraying chemicals,” recalls the 37-year-old. “Mostly on sugar cane and bananas in North Queensland, which is way up north in the tropics. And also on the rice in New South Wales.”

Mick echoes a number of his current colleagues, most of whom learned their chops as bush pilots in the Canadian north, when he emphasizes the importance of the skills he acquired at the time—flying by the seat of his pants in a field notorious for the demands it places on the pilot.

“It’s completely different from military flying,” he says. “From a procedural, to a ‘just-get-the-job-done’ attitude. Bush and float flying is also about getting the job done, and Harbour Air is like the airline version of that.”

For Mick, the path to Harbour Air really begins back there, in the hot seat of his crop duster. Or rather, in a trailer, where he was cooling his jets one afternoon waiting for the rain to end, and leafing through an aviation magazine. “It had a Turbine Otter in it,” he says. “A big float plane. And I thought, ‘Wow, that would be the coolest thing to do one day’.”

Two years later, in 2000, Mick used a holiday trip to Canada to score his seaplane rating with Cooper Air, a company that was eventually bought by Harbour Air. Mick also obtained something even more important during that vacation.

“That’s when I met a Canadian girl,” he laughs, “who I eventually married.”

Eight years later, Mick and his wife Tracey are firmly ensconced Islanders with an eight-month-old daughter, not to mention an extra thousand square feet of space Mick just added to their house, courtesy of his side interest in home renovation. The Egans also recently purchased a second property for Mick to gussy up in whatever spare time he can find between work and new parenthood.

“A wife, a baby, and a couple of houses,” he muses, his voice quiet, and his native accent softened by his new life. “I came out here for a holiday, and a couple years after I was living the dream.”