Ben Taber has been racking up flying hours—more than 12,000 in Beechcraft King Air 200s and 20,000 total—as a charter pilot for Dreamline Aviation, a charter operator headquartered at Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles. Taber is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and flies mostly from San Carlos Airport, and over the years, he has developed a reputation as a mentor to up-and-coming pilots. Part of that mentoring includes helping new (and old) pilots understand not only how to fly safely, but also what makes a good pilot a professional. If anyone could be called “old school,” it’s Taber, who still flies with paper charts. Countless pilots that he has mentored might recall him stressing the need to know how to navigate without GPS, what exactly is going on during controller handoffs, or the nuances of a particular regulation. And as they move on to careers in business aviation and with airlines, hopefully, they’ll remember the lessons Taber taught them and pass them on to the new pilots they encounter.
How is Dreamline Aviation Doing?
We're humming along; we’re just busy as can be. We need a couple more King Airs. We’re losing [pilots] to the majors [airlines] on a pretty good clip. It’s a fun airplane to teach, and [we have] a mentorship program where we pick up copilots at around 400 hours. We keep them for a couple of years and then off they go to bigger things, either with us or with someone else.
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