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PROFILE


education. But there was one problem – he didn’t know what he wanted to do. He did as many high school juniors and seniors do, and he visited with the school’s guidance counselor. The counselor started off by asking, “What do you want to do?” Wilken replied, “I don’t know.” Then his counselor asked, “What do like? What are you good at?” Wilken thought about it and answered, “Well, I enjoy


building and fl ying radio-controlled airplanes and I like electronics.”


The guidance counselor then asked, “Have you ever considered avionics?” Wilken had never heard about avionics. However, after his guidance counselor explained that avionics meant working on the electronics systems of airplanes, he knew that is what he wanted to do.


AVIONICS SCHOOL Not too far south from his hometown of Carlyle was Carbondale, IL, home of Southern Illinois University (SIU) at Carbondale. The university had a well-known aviation program based at the airport. It had A&P, avionics and fl ight schools. Wilken enrolled at SIU in its two-year avionics associate degree program.


PILOTS LICENSE Two years later, after getting his associate’s degree in avionics, Wilken decided he wanted to pursue further education. “I knew I was going to work in aviation,” Wilken says. “If I was going to work in aviation, I wanted to know how to fl y airplanes.” Wilken signed up for fl ying lessons at SIU. “The fi rst time


I ever fl ew in an airplane, I was sitting in the pilot’s seat taking my fi rst fl ying lesson,” he shares. Wilken got his pilot’s license that year.


After getting his pilot’s license, Wilken stayed at SIU to


pursue a bachelor’s degree in aviation management. Two years later, with an associate’s degree in avionics, a bachelor’s degree in aviation management and a pilot’s license, he was ready for his fi rst job in aviation.


ENTERING A DOWN AVIATION INDUSTRY Unfortunately, Wilken’s timing wasn’t good. It was December of 1989 and the aviation industry was in a slump. “I interviewed at a lot of diff erent places, but not many people were hiring at that time,” Wilken shares. After about six months of job searching, and with student loans coming due, Wilken was able to land his fi rst aviation job. “There was a job opening with a company in northwest Illinois in the Quad Cities,” Wilken says. “The company at the time was called Elliott Beechcraft. I talked to the manager, Dan Frahm. The company was looking for someone to repair radios on the bench (a bench tech), and I practically begged my way in for an interview. ‘You don’t


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have to give me anything,’ I told him. ‘I’ll just drive up there if you could take some time to talk to me.’” Wilken got an opportunity to interview with Frahm at Elliott Beechcraft. During the interview, Frahm was asking typical questions. “What do you know about radios?” “Can you do this?” As the interview progressed, it turned out that a college buddy from SIU would help Wilken land the job. “I didn’t know it when I went in for the interview, but one of my classmates at college, Lance Fox, had already graduated and had been hired by Elliott Beechcraft,” Wilkin tells D.O.M. magazine. “Lance was hired on as the avionics manager at Elliott Beechcraft’s Omaha facility. During the interview, his name somehow came up. ‘I know Lance,’ I said. ‘Oh, you do?’ he replied. ‘What do you think he’d say about you?’ I told him I thought he would speak pretty good about me. ‘Let’s just get him on the phone,’ Frahm said.” Frahm got Fox on the phone. “I’m sitting up here with


Mark Wilken,” the he said. “He’s up here trying to get a job as a bench tech. What do you think about him?” “I remember Lance’s reply to this day,” Wilken says. “He said, ‘he taught me everything I know about radios.’”


THE FIRST YEAR Wilken got the job as a bench tech. The company really didn’t have anybody at the time — just one person doing a few repairs here and there. “They had a stack of around seven KX 170B radios stacked on the bench needing to be repaired,” Wilken says. “I had worked on those radios in school and knew them inside and out, so it was easy for me to hit the ground running.” Throughout that fi rst year at Elliott, Wilken worked on


numerous avionics systems including NAVCOMs, weather radars, transponders and the newer King and Collins radios that were coming out. Wilken had become profi cient as a bench tech. He


says that he is the type of person who, once he becomes profi cient at something, gets bored and wants to learn more. He started to do more fl ight line repairs. He started learning the autopilot system. Soon, he was “the autopilot guy.” “Looking back, I think it worked out so well because I had my pilot’s license – I knew how airplanes fl y and what they need to do,” Wilken says. “As an avionics tech, I knew how the avionics system worked, and how everything worked together.” Working on the fl ight line also gave Wilken the opportunity to build up some right-seat time doing fl ight tests.


THE FIRST SUPERVISORY JOB Wilken moved up to a supervisory role his third year at Elliott. The company had hired more bench techs because business was booming and Wilken was their supervisor. Elliott was getting more and more into modifi cations — and when Wilken saw what was going on in the modifi cations department, he wanted to learn more. He started to work more closely with the modifi cation team.


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