Nicole Battjes strides out to the Airbus AS350 B2 (AStar) painted with a bright rainbow twist for a focused preflight on the ramp at the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (PHNL) in Honolulu, Hawaii. I’d met Battjes and general manager Susan Kim at the Women in Aviation International Conference earlier this year in Nashville—and now it’s Kim giving us a final briefing after taking the golf cart out from their offices in the Castle & Cooke Aviation building.
We’ll be flying with the doors off for a photo mission around Oahu—that’s photographers Jim Barrett and Stephen Yeates and I—and we’re entrusted with keeping our camera equipment safely inside the helicopter and out of the tail rotor of the pretty beast. I get to sit up front with Battjes in the left seat with a panoramic view ahead. After a week and a half of flying around the islands in Barrett’s Cessna 210 for an upcoming feature on flying Hawaii for the print edition, I’m still excited to see the island from this new perspective.
