Twenty-one years in aviation. Nearly thirteen of them leading a station. Leadership built from the ground up.

Airport Manager, Copa Airlines

In November 2009, I was promoted to Airport Manager for Copa Airlines at Port-au-Prince International Airport. I held that responsibility until September 2022, nearly thirteen years.

That's long enough to stop thinking of a station as a job and start thinking of it as something you're responsible for end to end: staffing it correctly, keeping the operation on schedule, maintaining safety standards, managing relationships with authorities and partners, and making sure the many small operational decisions happening behind the scenes do not become problems for the passenger later in the journey.

Station management touches almost everything at once. Operations, safety, documentation, staff, customer service, and outside stakeholders all move together, and an Airport Manager is the person who has to see how they connect, not just manage each one separately.

But that leadership wasn't the starting point. It was built from the ground up.

Where It Started: Operations & Dispatch

I entered aviation in September 2001, at the same airport, in operations and dispatch, working through a ground-handling environment that exposed me to several airlines and the different ways they each ran their operation.

That's where I built my operational foundation: dispatch activities, weight and balance, crew communication and coordination, ramp activities, ground-operation coordination, and adapting operations when weather or other operational conditions changed.

The Supervisor Years

Before Airport Manager came supervision, and before that, the counter. Check-in, boarding, the front line where an airline's operation and a passenger's experience meet directly.

I supervised counter and check-in operations, led customer service staff, and handled customer care and claims, the day-to-day work of making sure passengers got what they needed and staff had what they needed to deliver it.

That stage is where operational knowledge turns into people leadership. You stop just knowing how the work gets done and start being responsible for the people doing it.

Two years as a direct Copa Airlines Airport Supervisor, then nearly thirteen as Airport Manager. Twenty-one years total, building experience across operations, passenger service, supervision, and station leadership.

What Airport Leadership Actually Requires

An airport station is a lot of things happening at once, pretending to be one thing. People, aircraft, schedules, safety, passengers, partners, and paperwork all have to move together, and a problem in one of them rarely stays contained there.

A delay affects staffing. Staffing affects passengers. Passengers affect how the whole operation gets perceived that day, by the people flying and the people managing it.

Passengers Were Never Separate From Operations

An airline can run an operationally perfect day and still lose a passenger's trust in five minutes at a counter. Understanding both sides, the mechanics of the operation and what a passenger actually experiences, is what makes station leadership work, not just one or the other.

Communication Was Already Part of the Job

Aviation wasn't the only thing I was building. My background is in social communication, and from 2012 to 2020, alongside the airport years, I also worked in radio.

An airport station runs on communication as much as it runs on procedure: with employees, with crews, with airline leadership, with authorities, with the public when something needs explaining. I also pursued additional training in crisis communication, including through Kenyon International Emergency Services, because aviation is an environment where how something is communicated can matter as much as what happened.

An International Environment

Twenty-one years in a station that connects to airlines and colleagues across North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean built a professional network, and a comfort operating across cultures and languages, that doesn't come from a single-market career.

English, French, Spanish, and Haitian Creole all got used in that environment, sometimes in the same day.

Twenty-One Years, Still in Motion

This chapter shaped how I think about leadership, communication, customer experience, and how problems actually move through an organization, and it hasn't stopped being useful just because the day-to-day work changed.

What's been added since, in organizational improvement, strategic communication, and digital tools, doesn't replace that experience. It gives it a wider range of problems it can help with.