Jennie Olafson vividly remembers descending into Los Angeles as a child, seated in the plane’s cockpit next to her pilot father.

Olafson caught her father’s love of flying and became a pilot herself, following in her father’s footsteps and working for Air Canada. But in Olafson’s seven years at the company, the father-daughter duo hadn’t had the chance to fly together professionally.

Last week, they made it happen. Olafson and her father James Sullivan navigated a round-trip Air Canada flight from Vancouver to Taipei, Taiwan on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

“To fly together on a professional level was just one of those things that we absolutely had to do before my dad retires,” Olafson told the Star.

And aside from the family ties in the pilots’ seats — which Sullivan called a “very special” experience — the overseas flight was entirely normal.

“That’s the way we like it,” Sullivan said.

Olafson is based out of Vancouver, and Sullivan out of Toronto. “We don’t get to see each other that often, so it was a great way to have a good visit,” Olafson said.

“It was just something I’d always worked towards as a little kid, to actually fly with my dad. I never thought it was going to be possible.”

Sullivan called the flight a “special occasion.”

“It was the first time I got to see her as (part of) a crew, part of the team getting the flight to where it’s going, and I was quite impressed with her work ethic and how she did,” he said.

Sullivan has been a pilot for 45 years. Two of his children are pilots for Air Canada today. When they were growing up, Sullivan said he looked for little indications that they shared his passion.

“It became very obvious to me, very early on, that they both had a love for flying,” Sullivan said.

While it was the pair’s first time flying a commercial jet together professionally, it wasn’t their first time together in the cockpit. Before 9/11, family members were sometimes permitted to sit in the cockpit’s third seat, dubbed the jumpseat, for trips.

“Going into L.A., I remember looking out — because it’s parallel runways — looking out my window and seeing another airplane flying in on an approach at the same time as us,” Olafson recalled. “And I thought that was really, really neat.”

In the early 2000s, when Olafson was doing her training, her father once joined her for a circuit around the airport. That time, Olafson was the pilot in command, and Sullivan came along for the ride.

Sullivan arranged an introductory flight for Olafson during her last year of high school, “and that was really when I decided that’s exactly what I wanted to do,” she said.

“I couldn’t not do it after that.”

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While Sullivan took the military route to becoming a pilot, Olafson attended the Western University’s aviation program. A year as an instructor was followed by four years as a pilot in northern Ontario, “basically in the bush.”

Olafson’s husband, also a pilot, comes from a long line of aviation professionals too.

“My kids are screwed,” Olafson said with a laugh. “My kids are very obsessed with air planes already, and they’re only one and three.”

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