8 | AUGUST 2019 FLYINGMAG.COM
Editor’s LetterON COURSE
Editor-in-ChiefT
his month, we welcome a new editor to Flying. Julie
Boatman, who some of you undoubtedly already know
from her past freelance stories for us or perhaps recall from
her days as an editor with AOPA Pilot magazine, joins the
team as our new associate editor.
Julie is a longtime pilot who earned her private,
commercial, instrument and CFI tickets by the time she
graduated from college at the University of Colorado
at Boulder. Since then, she has made her career in avi-
ation, first as a flight instructor and then as an editor at
Jeppesen before joining the editorial staff at AOPA. After
that assignment, she became manager of Cessna Pilot
Centers at Cessna Aircraft and then returned to Jeppesen
under Boeing Flight Services as manager of the Aviation
Training Solutions group.
In 2014, she struck out on her own, founding
JulietBravoFox Media, an aviation marketing and
consulting company. For the past several years she has
been delivering on f light-training contracts for clients in
Portugal. Now she’s back home in America, and we couldn’t
be happier to have her on our staff.
Julie holds CFI and ATP certificates along with type
ratings in the Cessna Citation Mustang and Douglas DC-3.
Some of you may recall Julie’s past work in these pages
including our March 2016 cover story on the 80th anniver-
sary of the DC-3. She was the natural choice to write that
article (with all due respect to Martha Lunken) as she has
authored two books on the subject: 2011’s Together We Fly:
Voic e s f r om t he D C - 3, and another in 2018, Honest Vision:
The Donald Douglas Story, both published by ASA.
Julie joins the staff to take over some big roles left
unattended after Pia Bergqvist, our longtime executive
editor, stepped into a new role with the magazine as edi-
tor-at-large—which is a fancy way of saying editor-when-
she’s-available. You see, a few months ago, Pia decided
to rekindle a long-held dream that was extinguished on
September 11, 2001. She’d applied for a job with SkyWest
the day before, on September 10, her timing coincidental
with the largest terror attack on U.S. soil and the ensuing
shock to the airline industry. SkyWest never called her for
an interview.
Pia spent the next several years doing terrific work in
a number of aviation industry roles, including as a sales
demo pilot for Cessna. Along the way, she and Julie got to be
good friends. After stints with other aviation publications,
Pia joined Flying as senior editor at almost exactly the same
time I did in 2010. We worked side by side as an excellent
team, but for Pia the itch to f ly big iron never completely
disappeared. With the airline pilot shortage deepening, she
decided once again to chase her dream of donning airline
pilot stripes. She’s now just settling into the right seat of a
SkyWest CRJ as a freshly minted first officer.
Pia will continue to write feature articles and travel
with us to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and other aviation events
as her schedule allows. Julie now takes the baton from
her, assuming many of Pia’s old duties and new ones as
well, as we expand our dig-
ital reach even further
while continuing to deliver
exceptional content with
a fresh perspective to the
best print magazine audi-
ence in aviation.WELCOME,
JULIE
A FAMILIAR FACE JOINS THE FLYING TEAM