This airline will let you sit in the co-pilot’s seat, but it won’t carry your cake

Tinian, Northern Marina Islands CNN — In these days of long airport security lines and faceless online reservation systems, imagine booking a flight with an airline where you can ask for your pilot by name and then sit in the co-pilot’s seat. Brad Lendon/CNN Later, sitting in the pilots’ room at Tinian airport, he recounts a more harrowing experience, one of the airline’s “discovery flights,” 25-minute charter tours above Saipan, where tourists get a chance to take the controls. “Even pilots who haven’t been with us for four years.” A pilot incubator George Haines, 48, Star Marianas assistant director of operations, says he can attest to the movie-star feel passengers bring. “We have to … make sure they don’t start becoming complacent or that they start to find interesting and exciting things to do with the airplane to get that excitement back,” he says. “I’m definitely a way better pilot now than when I first got here,” says Prevag Lukovic, a Serbia-born 29-year-old who grew up in Milwaukee and has been with Star Marianas since May 2019.