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PHOTO COURTESY DENNIS CLEAVES


FUTURE FACES By Jaasmin Foote


HAI AMT Scholarship Winner Alec Dockery Desire for a hands-on career led Colorado student to pursue A&P school.


G


ROWING UP IN CASTLE ROCK, Colorado, Alec Dockery had a family member who was a pilot,


but he never imagined becoming an avia- tion maintenance technician (AMT). In fact, it took him a while to realize why aviation maintenance was the perfect career for him. Alec’s fascination with aircraft was born from spending time with his maternal grandfather, a pilot and aviation enthusiast. “My grandfather loved planes,” says


Alec. “He got his pilot’s license before he got his driver’s license. We used to visit air- ports together to look at planes, and we went to lots of air shows. I even watched him use flight simulators a few times.” After high school, Alec enrolled in an audio engineering program at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado.


76 ROTOR MARCH 2021


After two years there, he transferred to Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU) to pursue another passion: com- puter information systems. However, after two semesters at MSU, Alec couldn’t see himself sitting in front of a computer for the rest of his professional life. He wanted, instead, more hands-on work. Alec thought long and hard about what vocation would make him happiest and went back to his roots in search of answers. “I’ve always liked fixing things, but my personal projects were minimal before I went to A&P school,” says Alec. “I worked on my guitar and helped a few friends fix cars—nothing expansive. But doing these things allowed me to work with my hands, and I loved it. I guess that’s where [my interest in maintenance] all started.”


It was then that Alec had the idea to merge the careers of the two men who had influenced him most: his pilot grand- father on his mother’s side and his paternal grandfather, who had been an engineer at Ford.


“I sort of did a mashup of the two and came up with a career of my own,” says Alec. “The more I learned about aviation, the more it interested me. I also discov- ered that before my [maternal] grandfather passed away, he had a few helicopter hours written in his pilot logbook. And then my other grandfather was an engineer, and I enjoyed fixing things, so [helicopter main- tenance] made sense.” Armed with his new game plan, Alec enrolled in an A&P program at Colorado Northwestern Community College (CNCC) in the fall of 2018. Alec discovered HAI’s


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