Lee Cataluna: Nolan Madriaga living the dream as an airline pilot

Some people know from a very early age what they want to do with their lives.

Nolan Madriaga was a little kid standing with his dad outside the fence line of Kahului Airport when he knew.

“After work, my father would take me to watch the planes take off and land from Runway 2,” Madriaga said. “One day, and I don’t know why I remember this because I must have been only 2 or 3 years old, but my father said to me, ‘You can do that.’”

That moment set his course.

In third grade, he wrote an essay declaring he’d be a pilot. In middle school, he joined the Civil Air Patrol. At King Kekaulike High School, he became cadet commander for the Maui CAP unit and spent his summers at training camps held on Oahu military bases.

As his high school graduation neared in 2003, Madriaga researched colleges with aviation programs. Most of them were so expensive. “My mom told me, ‘Just choose a school. We’ll figure it out.’ They never said no to me. They told me to go for it.”

Madriaga ended up finding a program at Honolulu Community College that was connected to the University of North Dakota, which is considered one of the most comprehensive aerospace university programs in the country. Madriaga moved to Honolulu and lived with his grandmother in Kalihi, paid in-state tuition for two years while working a restaurant job, and joined the Aloha Airlines Explorers program, which offered students an in-depth experience of the airline industry.

“To think back to that time, all of us in the Explorers program were just dreaming about it,” he said.

He got his private pilot’s license while at HCC, and his first official passenger was his good friend Lauren Wong, who wasn’t afraid to fly with a new pilot.

After two years at HCC, he transferred to the Grand Forks campus in North Dakota, braving winters that were 62 degrees below zero to get experience flying in all sort of weather conditions. “I grew up in Makawao so I have a thick skin,” he said, “but there’s no way to describe that kind of cold.”

His dream was to come home and fly in Hawaii. He already had a connection to Aloha Airlines through the Explorers program and was hoping to get on at Island Air. But just as he was finishing college, the airline shut down. Madriaga didn’t give up on his dream, but he had to figure out what to do next.

“It was the years after 9/11, and people were telling me the industry was not doing well because people didn’t want to fly,” he said. “There were layoffs and furloughs, and everything in the airlines is about seniority. But you have to want to do this. You have to say, ‘I don’t care what anyone says. I’m going to keep going.’”

He worked for a small commuter airline called Pinnacle, flying jets out of Minneapolis to places like Oklahoma City, sometimes working crazy shifts or waiting by the phone hoping to get an assignment. After five years in Minnesota, he relocated to Seattle and married Lauren, his best friend who had been his first passenger.

When Pinnacle Airlines was sold, Madriaga found a job with Horizon Air flying turboprops “low and slow” along the West Coast. “I loved Seattle because everything airplane-related is there. Boeing is there. I got my seaplane rating there. I took helicopter lessons. It’s an aviator’s paradise.”

But the dream of flying in Hawaii skies never faded.

In 2014, Hawaiian Airlines called him out of the blue. He had applied to the airline two years earlier but never heard back. Hawaiian asked Madriaga if he wanted to come home. He and his wife broke the lease on their apartment and headed home to grandma’s house in Kalihi.

The timing was significant: They had just found out they were expecting a baby.

Madriaga flew interisland flights for Hawaiian as a first officer, a schedule that allowed him to be at every doctor’s appointment during the pregnancy and to be present for his daughter’s birth. “I wasn’t rushing to try to get home from Japan or something,” he said.

This summer, Madriaga was promoted to captain, the highest rank for a pilot, going from three stripes to four on his uniform.

“All those times I heard ‘You’re not going to make it’ or ‘It’s not a good time in the airline industry,’ all the time I was by myself in the middle of winter or flying in junky conditions — that’s what you work for. I tell people that the fourth stripe is really heavy.”

He is a young-looking 34-year-old, and says he still gets asked all the time if he’s old enough to fly the plane. “I worked last week Friday, Saturday, Sunday and I was asked that question three days in a row.”

His parents, Gery and Therese Madriaga, keep track of his flying schedule and sometimes show up on his flight without telling him. “They stick their head in and go, ‘Oh, hi.’” He flies with a number of classmates from the Explorers program who also followed their dreams to the skies.

His daughter Kayla is 4 years old now. She’s already a world traveler, having logged over 200,000 miles.

I asked if he ever takes Kayla to the fence line to watch planes take off and land.

“No,” he said, and showed a picture of her sitting in his chair in the cockpit. “She gets the best seat in the house.”

But what he tells her, and what he tells every kid he meets through his job, echoes what his father told him outside Kahului Airport: Whatever they want to be in life, they can do it.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.