Working Opportunities
“From that point I developed a relationship with the FAA,” says Rowles. “The agency approached me with the opportunity to become a pilot examiner because of my history with Robinsons.” He took the offer and that led to meeting one of his biggest mentors, Wayne Weisman, who trained pilots at the local sheriff’s office. “As an examiner, I worked with Wayne. He invited me to fly with him in his vintage Sikorsky aircraft in my off-time. I learned a lot about flying safely from him as I was learning the business side of helicopters from my employer, Dan, at Air Coastal Helicopters.” The young pilot wanted even more experience and applied for an S-76 instructor position at Flight Safety international. “So, in my early 20s, I was working at Air Coastal Helicopters as chief pilot, was an FAA designated pilot examiner, and teaching for Flight Safety International. In addition, I was doing a lot of part- time flying for corporate operators and for the South Florida Water Management District. I was probably filing seven or eight W-2s (income tax statements) a year. Not only did the jobs make ends meet for my family, but it also gained me a wide variety of experience, especially in the S-76,” says Rowles.
Now that the young Rowles family was on its feet financially, Rowles and Samantha, who had worked in customer service for Jet Aviation (in part to use its radio to talk to her constantly flying husband), started their own training school in 2001. Rowles approached his previous employer, Brian Parker, who agreed to let the young couple have the name of his old business. Thus, the Rowles rebirthed Palm Beach Helicopters.
The school was succeeding and expanding from Robinsons to turbine aircraft, then the phone rang in the Palm Beach Helicopters office. It wasn’t another prospective customer; it was Bell Helicopter calling out of the clear blue sky to offer Rowles his dream job. “Their chief flight instructor, another mentor of mine, Gary Young, was retiring and had recommended me for his plumb job at Bell,” says Rowles. “I was reluctant to leave my ongoing jobs and our business in South Florida, until Samantha encouraged me to follow my long-time, but I thought never realistic, dream of wearing a blue suit as a Bell career instructor.”
Rowles then began stressful years of setbacks and advancement. Failure and Fortitude
In 2004, Rowles moved to Texas to start his Bell Helicopter career, leaving his family behind. His sister stepped in to manage Palm Beach Helicopters until the business sold so that Samantha could join her husband in Texas four months later.
Since Rowles had owned a helicopter company and had charter helicopter experience, he was asked to interact with the Bell executive team in a program called the Bell Operational Transformation Program, with the goal of providing feedback on how Bell Helicopter could improve its aircraft customer service. He was subsequently asked to enter Bell’s executive management mentorship program titled the High-Potential Employee Program.
16 Jan/Feb 2021
As part of the program, Rowles reported weekly to either the CEO or executive vice president for personal mentoring. At one casual Saturday morning meeting, the vice president was wearing a Harvard Business School T-shirt, prompting Rowles to inquire if his mentor graduated from the college. In return he asked about Rowles’ college degree. Rowles answered that he didn’t have a college degree and that he quit school in ninth grade — but he had a GED. “He looked at me like I had a third eye,” Rowles said. He asked how Rowles got hired at Bell for his position. Rowles replied, “You guys never asked me about any degrees. You all called and offered me the job and I took it.” Rowles was informed that he had just “hit a glass ceiling” in his Bell advancement prospects.
The corporation steered him to get an executive MBA at Texas Christian University. “That college admissions interview was one of the hardest interviews in my life,” recalls Rowles. He was accepted with Bell’s recommendation. The business school and Bell wanted Rowles to gain executive team leadership experience. Such an opportunity came when Silver State Helicopters in Nevada urged Rowles to join the company and straighten out its operations, which were drastically declining. With an agreement from his employer that he could return if things didn’t work out at Silver State, Rowles took the mission-impossible assignment in October 2007. The Great Recession was just getting underway, and Rowles was shocked that Silver State’s ownership had acquired unsurmountable corporate debt. “By the time I got there, they had gone from a company with great liquidity to great debt,” Rowles says. He quickly surmised that Silver State Helicopters was a sinking ship, and gave notice of his intent to jump from the doomed company with the plan of heading back home to Bell. Days later, Silver State Helicopters filed for bankruptcy and closed its doors on Super Bowl Sunday.
“My leaving Bell (for Silver State leadership experience and an MBA) had a major impact on my career, because although Bell’s executive team thought it would be very good for me to leave to get my MBA, it put a bit of a divide between me and Bell’s pilot staff leadership because we all had different goals for me.” Upon his return, that pilot leadership directed Rowles to work on Bell’s production/manufacturing side in the Government Program Management Office — not work as a pilot. Not long after, Rowles was dismissed from Bell as the Great Recession caused the OEM to reduce its workforce. “There’s a little bit of a division (between Rowles and Bell’s pilot staff leadership) that never went away, but that’s the price you pay for making career decisions,” Rowles sums up the disappointing experience. “I like to grab onto challenges because I believe I can fix almost anything. My biggest failure is when I went to Silver State Helicopters. My be-all-and- end-all dream was to be a training instructor at Bell, and then I got caught up in other things at Silver State that I really believed I could fix. The strain that episode put on me and my family doesn’t discount what happened to other people, but it eventually cost me my dream at Bell. There’s a fork in the road in life, both personally and professionally. Everybody runs into forks multiple times. Sometimes you choose the right path and sometimes you don’t. But whatever the outcome, you don’t stop fighting and you keep moving forward as best you can.”
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