As a parent, it can be fun to take your kids to work with you so they can learn about your career. They might be bored out of their minds, or you could end up piquing an interest you didn’t know was there. When a pilot from the Netherlands took his daughter along on a flight in 2006, he had no idea they’d end up in the air together professionally.
Jasmijn van Waalwijk van Doorn went with her dad, Jorrit van Waalwijk van Doorn, on a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight from the Netherlands to Uganda, and a photo was snapped in the cockpit. Years later, the pair remade the picture as copilots, and now they regularly fly together.
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Jasmijn and her dad have flown together many times.
The female pilot told CNN the trip to Uganda was just the first of many flights she took with her dad through the years. That day, she had a stuffed lion with her, one that resembled the animals she saw during her visit to Africa. She loved to travel and was inspired to continue to travel the world, so she continued to fly with her dad throughout her childhood.
“That’s how I got to know the job – and where it started,” Jasmijn said.
The love of flying was in her blood.
Not only is her father a pilot, but her mother, Ellen, is also a flight attendant, so a love for travel was natural.
“You can invest in your relationship with your kid, and she can see what you’re doing. And then it’s more normal for her,” Jorrit told CNN. “We’d always do nice things on routes.”
Her mother’s love of aviation equally inspired Jasmijn. She encouraged her to learn to fly, and she took her first lesson at 12. By the time she got to high school, she knew she was destined to fly professionally.
“That’s when it became serious,” she told CNN. “I thought, ‘This is my dream, I want to be a pilot.’”
For her first professional flight with her dad, Jasmijn wanted it to be special.
She began training at the KLM Flight Academy in 2018 when she was 20 years old. According to CNN, she and her father got their first fight together in 2019 and have since flown together 17 times. Ellen was on their first flight and wanted her husband and daughter to recreate their 2008 photograph. Jasmijn had her lion with her, which was her mom’s idea.
“She said, ‘We have that picture of the two of you in the cockpit. Why not take the toy again, and take the same picture again?’” Jasmijn explained to CNN. “I was happy that I still had the toy because it’s so special to have that picture.”
When they fly together, it is all business.
Even though they are close, Jasmijn told CNN she calls her dad by his first name when they fly. And she loves learning from her dad.
“She’s a new-generation pilot,” Jorrit said. “The way she looks at things is a little bit different than how I learned to do it.”
She said she realizes how unique her family is and that being able to work with her dad and travel the world is very special.
“I’m aware that it’s very, very special to get to go to many places, just the two of you,” she told CNN. “It’s creating a lot of memories.”
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Jasmijn encourages others to spend quality time with their family.
She told CNN that she loves working with her dad and thinks others should take advantage of similar opportunities with their family.
“If you have the opportunity to do things like this together, then really just enjoy it as much as you can,” she explained.
Her dad added that he is grateful to his wife for taking that photo of him and Jasmijn when she was 8.
“It started off as a fun thing,” Jorrit recalled to CNN. “But it was nice to see the two pictures together, then and now.”
