PROFILE E
very year, we like to profi le an avionics manager for the D.O.M. magazine issue that we take to the Aircraft Electronics Association
(AEA) trade show and convention. I fi nd it interesting to interview avionics professionals and learn about the paths they took in their avionics careers. This month, we interviewed Mark Wilken, director of avionics sales for Moline, IL-based Elliott Aviation. This is Wilken’s story. Mark Wilken grew up in Carlyle, IL, a small town in southern Illinois. It was a small farming town, population 3,000. No one in his family was in aviation. Wilken’s interest in aviation began when he was in grade school. He received a radio-controlled (RC) plane as a gift when he was 12 years old. He enjoyed building and fl ying that plane and was hooked. He continued to build and fl y RC planes. By the time he was in high school, his hobby grew to the point where he was building 1/3-scale models. “It ended up getting to the point where I had to use a pickup truck to get my planes out to the fi eld because I was building ¼- and 1/3-size models,” Wilken shares. “I ended up re-kitting a lot of the
airplanes I built,” he says. “I would build them and then put them back into kit form. I called it ‘re-kitting.’ Others would call it ‘crashing.’” Wilken enjoyed building RC planes as
much as he enjoyed fl ying them. “I built the kits up from a box of balsa wood,” he shares. “I built the stringers and ribs. It was like building a little airplane when you look at it. I was putting frames in the fuselage and making sure everything was straight. Without knowing it at the time, I was learning a lot about airplanes while I was doing it. I learned how airplanes fl y and what makes them do what they do.” In addition to building and fl ying RC
planes, Wilken had another passion – working on electronics. “Electronics seemed to come easy to me,” he says. “I would take radios apart, and I would get into the middle of the electronics and work on them.” Wilken says he was never a “star” student in high school, but he always got decent grades. During his senior year, he thought he should go to college and get an
03 2014 8 Photos by Andrew Evans/Elliott Aviation MarkWilken By Joe Escobar
Director of Avionics Sales ELLIOTT AVIATION
DOMmagazine
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