Montreal pilot shares cockpit with daughter on final flight of long career

A farewell flight for a Montreal pilot captain was made extra special by having his daughter alongside him in the cockpit.

Earlier this month, Air Canada pilot Jean Castonguay made the final trip of a lengthy 37-year career. He shared the already memorable moment with his daughter Marie-Pierre, who served as his first officer.

That retirement voyage from France to Montreal will forever be treasured by the father-daughter duo.

“I will miss being 40,000 feet over the Atlantic, drinking a coffee and talking to Marie-Pierre. I will miss flight preparation. I will miss my colleagues, the camaraderie that we have among the pilots,” Jean told CityNews.

The now retired captain and chief pilot of Air Canada’s Airbus 330 fleet couldn’t help but reflect on how such a storied career all began.

“When I received a letter from Air Canada offering a job to me. I mean, I think I jumped six feet in the air reading that letter,” he said.

Having a father as a pilot paved the way for Marie-Pierre to dream big and follow in his footsteps.

“I was privileged enough to be exposed to aviation from a really young age when I was seeing my dad coming back from work,” she recalled. “But also being able to go on trips and seeing the inside of the flight deck when my sister and I were with them on trips.”

While the family connection of his farewell part will always mean a lot to him, Jean says the aviation world is filled with fascinating tales.

“Our world is unknown and a little story like that is just a little story among other little stories. There’s amazing little stories across aviation,” he said.

The expert aviator may be stepping away from his aircraft but he’s happy to pass the torch to his daughter – and he’s more than confident in her abilities.

Marie-Pierre echoed her father’s comments about the airline industry in Canada, calling it “small and unknown” with very few pilots.

“There’s still not that many pilots in Canada, if you think about it,” she said. “We’re still a small percentage of the population.”

Worsening pilot shortage

There is indeed an ongoing global pilot shortage, with aviation analysts predicting it is only worsening due to an aging workforce, pandemic-related layoffs, early retirements, and spiralling training costs.

Transport Canada numbers show the number of commercial pilot licences awarded each year was relatively consistent for much of the past decade, averaging 1,116 licences annually between the years 2012 and 2019.

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, however, those numbers fell off a cliff – to 474 licences that year and then declining even further to 293 in 2021 and 238 in 2022.

A commercial pilots’ licence is needed to legally work as a pilot in Canada, and getting one requires a combination of ground school study as well as a minimum of 200 hours of flight training.

“If you start thinking about, ‘oh my God, I have to build so many hours before I can fly a big jet aircraft for big companies,’ it could be scary and it could feel like you just want to give up,” said Marie-Pierre.

Further steps are required to become an airline pilot, as holders of commercial pilots’ licences must still undergo additional training and flying time before they can receive their Airline Transport Pilot Licence.

Experts say the dwindling numbers also reflect a broader unease with the state of the aviation industry and the stability of piloting as a career choice.

“Any jobs, there’s good stuff, there’s bad stuff, but it’s like a package,” said Jean. “You like it or you don’t. And being a pilot, yeah, there’s delays, there’s mechanical issues, there’s weather, there’s all kinds of stuff. But it’s part of the work trained for that and we deal with these things.

“If you look at an aircraft in the air flying – we all see airplanes in the air – if you see that, it gives you a little thing inside there. You have it there. You have the passion and just go for it.”

A 2018 report by the Canadian Council for Aviation and Aerospace said a third of flight operators in the country at that time cited pilots as their biggest skills shortage. The report said the need for experienced pilots was beginning to outpace the available national supply, and projected the industry would need an additional 7,300 pilots by 2025.

Marie-Pierre believes aspiring pilots need to stick their career goals because the achievement of flying a plane professionally is well worth it.

“I think a lot of pilots in Canada, it’s always the goal, the dream to fly for Air Canada,” she said. “So when we finally reach that milestone in our career, it’s definitely a wonderful day.”

–With files from The Canadian Press