(WACO) – David L. Ruiz can touch the sky, whether it is preaching a positive message from the pulpit or flying airplanes cross-country.
“I’ve always wanted to be a pilot since I was 3 years old,” said Ruiz, 52, a 2004 graduate of Texas State Technical College in Waco. “Our house was under the flight path of an airport. I would spend hours watching the airplanes coming in.”
Ruiz has been chief flight instructor at Aurora Aviation in McGregor since 2008. Aurora Aviation provides corporate flight service and teaches people how to fly. The company is owned by federal defense contractor Advanced Concepts and Technologies International with offices in Waco and Arlington, Virginia.
Aurora Aviation uses the same flight syllabus that TSTC’s Aircraft Pilot Training program in Waco uses for its students. TSTC currently has 125 students who can earn the Associate of Applied Science degree in Aircraft Pilot Training or the degree with a helicopter specialization. The students can also earn a certificate in Aircraft Pilot Technology Commercial Pilot-Helicopter or an enhanced skills certificate in Multi-Engine Aircraft Pilot.
“Our graduates have a variety of choices with regard to job opportunities, including but not limited to flight instruction, banner towing, tour flights, ferry flights, aerial photography, pipeline patrol, firefighting and agricultural applications,” said Rick Connor, lead instructor in the Aircraft Pilot Training program. “Those who choose the airline route have pipeline programs to choose from such as Skywest, ExpressJet or Envoy.”
Boeing’s 2016 Pilot and Technician Outlook found North America will need 112,000 pilots in the next two decades.
“Right now the demand for pilots is high,” Ruiz said. “For McLennan County to have aviation schools is an advantage for the students here.”
The company has three full-time flight instructors and one part-time instructor, with Ruiz being the only one having graduated from TSTC.
“Really, from the get-go he has been like a mentor,” said Matt Wallace, 28, a U.S. Army veteran and a former TSTC flight instructor now working for Ruiz. “He has been great, saying that I need to come along on flights. It has been good seeing David in action. I have gotten to go on some of David’s corporate flights.”
Ruiz stays busy in other areas of aviation. He is a corporate pilot and an adjunct lecturer at Baylor University’s Institute for Air Science. He buys and sells airplanes, and he owns Pegasus Drone Service in Waco for real estate, agricultural and search and rescue work. He also officiates at weddings.
Ruiz was born in Midland and grew up in Odessa. His father was from Mexico and worked in oil fields, but when Ruiz was a young child he wanted his family to be migrant farmworkers.
“If there was a field to pick, the Ruiz family was there,” Ruiz said. “We picked in the Southwest and up the West Coast. My father said if you could walk you could work.”
The family eventually settled in Eloy, Arizona, and Twin Falls, Idaho, before his father died and his mother moved her four children back to Texas. The children were homeschooled by their mother, but Ruiz eventually graduated in 1982 from Lee High School in Midland.
Ruiz went on a mission trip to Brazil in high school and felt God called him into the ministry. He put his aviation dreams on hold and graduated in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biblical Studies at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene. He worked three jobs to put himself through college.
It was during his junior year at Hardin-Simmons that Ruiz traveled to TSTC in Waco to meet the Aircraft Pilot Training faculty. Ruiz said he does not remember how he heard about TSTC, but he knew he needed to see the campus.
Ruiz studied flight training in the late 1980s at TSTC in Waco and took an academic hiatus before graduating in 2004 with an Associate of Applied Science degree in Aircraft Pilot Training.
“You have to go where the job is,” Ruiz said. “You just have to love aviation.”
