Fernando Tripodi: The Art of Flying

Like most Of his colleagues, Fernando Tripodi settled on a career in aviation not long after learning to tie his shoelaces. Now forty and the father of two young daughters, the soft spoken pilot takes on a certain tone—a complete absence of equivocation—when he recalls his childhood conviction to fly.

“I had this burning desire to do it. My earliest recollection would be from when I was five or six, and that’s all I wanted to do—fly airplanes. It got to the point where if I heard a plane, I’d drop Pilot Fernando Tripodi loves to finesse seaplane
landings (Nicole Iorns)everything, or jump up from the dinner table, run outside and climb up onto the roof of the house. And I’d follow the plane until I lost sight of it. I always had the bug in me.”

It would be some time before Fernando could satisfy that bug. Originally from Uruguay, his family came to Canada when the South American nation was seized by political instability in the early seventies. Fernando was seven at the time, and remembers “machine gun fire off in the distance at night.” Settling in Scarborough, Ontario, Fernando’s artistic talents would eventually steer him towards the Fine Arts program at Queen’s University in Kingston, but it was during the bus ride to his interview—portfolio at his side—that Fernando found himself at “a crossroads”.

“Did I want to go into Fine Arts, and be a starving artist?” he remembers thinking. “Or should I really follow my heart, and do what I always wanted to do: fly?”

Fernando’s father, who worked as a steam locomotive engineer when in South America, had harboured his own unfulfilled aviation bug. He once told his son, “When you choose a career, make sure it’s something that will make you happy, something that fills your soul, because you’re going to be doing it for a long time.” With that paternal advice no doubt echoing through his mind, Fernando put the arts degree on ice. Financing himself through a series of jobs—“working two weeks in order to go flying for three or four hours,” he chuckles—Fernando emerged with his private, and commercial licences in 1993.

He’s logged thousands of hours in the sky since then, and came to Harbour Air in 2005. But the artist inside of him never really died, and it’s evident when Fernando talks about the more ineffable aspects of his passion, like the “soul” or “heartbeat” of flying. Or when he reveals the small pleasures that his career still brings.

“The reason they just plop the big jets on the runway,” he begins, “is because, if they were to finesse the landing, they would run out of runway. We have so many miles of runway with water on B.C.’s coast that we can touch down and not have the passengers feel it. I try for that every chance I get. That’s the objective, to have the passengers wondering if they have landed yet. It’s a great feeling, when you’ve done your job and the passengers feel comfortable and safe.”