Pilot license: Adam's ticket to the world

But, when you get your pilot's license at 17 around the same time as you get your driver's license, you're pretty much guaranteed to have a life that's far from dull.

After many years flying for the NT Police Air Wing and the RFDS out of Alice Springs and Darwin, Mr Booker is based now with his family at Hedlow Station, near Yeppoon.

The property which includes Hedlow airfield was bought last year by cattle producer John Speed, who Mr Booker now works for as a pilot flying the company, Cessna 208.

Prior to working for Mr Speed, Mr Booker flew for the McDonald family, who have large cattle holdings throughout north west Queensland, while their regular pilot was on leave for a year.

"I learnt to fly while at school. I started at 16...dad was a private pilot...and I was one of the kids who hung around the aero club all weekend," he said.

"In those days you had to be 16 to start to learn to fly so when I turned 16 mum and dad started paying for lessons for me.

"I only just scraped through Year 12 because I had no interest in it. I was always at the aero club. I was always studying for flying exams and not worrying about homework. I got my pilots and drivers license in the same year."

But getting a job as a pilot was not as easy as getting his license when he left school so Mr Booker took on a variety of jobs including being a darkroom technician and milkman before deciding to get his commercial pilots license and moving to Alice Springs at the age of 21.

"It was not long after the pilots strike so there was a real glut of experienced pilots at the top of the tree that were unemployed and any job that came up they would get them because of their experience. This is 1994," he said.

"So for us brand new commercial pilots, it was very, very difficult as there were no jobs anywhere."

After a couple of years though and still no full time pilot's job, Mr Booker packed up his belongings again and moved to Brisbane where he worked for his father for a bit before joining the police force.

"I only did it for just under five years and still hadn't flown an aeroplane in this time," he said.

It was only after another stint working for his father on an olive farm west of Port Macquarie for three years and a move back to Port where he was a partner in a retail furniture did he start flying again.

"When I was back in Port Macquarie, that's when I got back into flying...I did my instrument rating...and while I had the business I got my instructor's rating and started instructing at the aero club... that was about 2009, " he said.

That lead to him taking on a job as a ferry pilot with Australian Air Ferry out of Kempsey followed by work as a pilot for Premier Aviation doing aero medical transfers out of Coffs Harbour for NSW Health.

Mr Booker said the ferry pilot job meant flying a lot of planes out of America across the Pacific back to Australia or out of Europe.

"So a client would ring up and say I've just bought a plane in the States, I want you to go and get it so we'd jump on a burner (flight) and go to where the aeroplane was," he said.

"The first one I got was just outside of New York and we had a base in California near San Jose. We had a hanger there...we'd pick up a plane from all over the place and fly them back to California to Hollister. Then we'd spend a few days getting them ready for ferry so we'd take all the seats out and ship them back to Australia and then we'd install big bladder fuel tanks in the back of the plane and fill them up with fuel and install HF radios and then we'd take off and start heading home.

"The scariest thing about that job was the first day, it was always the first day, it was a new aeroplane to you, you weren't 100 per cent convinced on its reliability and you didn't know the history of the aircraft so the first day was always from Hollister to the big island of Kona in Hawaii.

"That was a big day, that was 2000 nautical miles, roughly Sydney to Perth, and we did it in one day and on average it was a 14 hour flight and that was scary because between mainland USA and Hawaii there's no island.

"We're talking 4-seater Cessnas, you've got no options (if things go wrong) you're in the water so you either made it or you didn't."

The job doing aero medical transfers in twin engine aeroplanes was not as challenging as the ferry job although Mr Booker does recall one incident when one of the engines failed taking off from Coffs Harbour.

"There's an unwritten rule in aviation and that's to undo the last thing you did so I turned off the engine, it died...I turned it back on and it spluttered to life - we had a patient on board, but we try not to tell the patients (when there's a problem)."

After two years, Mr Booker started applying for better paid and more high performing jobs so when a job came up for a PC12 pilot with the Northern Territory Police Air Wing in Alice Springs he went for it and got it.

In 2014, after a couple of years with the NT Police Air Wing, he applied for and got a job as a pilot "next door" at the RFDS until 2017.

Mr Booker said he did a lot of prisoner transfers for the NT Police Air Wing without incident, moving police around, and helping in search and rescue operations.

"A lot of it was routine work...we were basically like a Toyota Hilux with wings, we just ran around the central desert picking up people," he said.

Mr Booker said flying for the RFDS five days a week on a rotational roster, however, had its challenges particularly flying at night or during a storm.

"Half of our flying was at the back end of the clock, at night time, flying into communities in the middle of the night, we used to call them black holes because you just can't see out there, there's no city lights. On a night when there's no moon, it's just black," he said.

"And when you get to these communities all you see is these really pale set of lights which is the runway and you're just descending into this black hole and you don't know what's up and what's down. It really gets your attention when you're landing on a dirt strip in the middle of the desert at three o'clock in the morning...you really only see the runaway at about 20 ft when you're just about to land."

After leaving the RFDS in May, 2017, Mr Booker returned to the NT Police Air Wing, but this time it was as its chief pilot in Darwin where he stayed until 2022.

He said there was a lot more admin work as chief pilot in charge of eight pilots and two operations staff, but he still got to fly two to three times a week.

Mr Booker lists one of the highlights of his flying career was while working as the NT Police Air Wing's chief pilot and when he was able to procure and ferry back one of its new plane, a Pilatus PC-12, from Switzerland.

"It was an adventure," he said.