Sanne and Nick Gibson are two Wizz Air captains who first met at pilot school in Arizona and now fly for the same budget airline, managing to juggle life as parents with flying across Europe
Sanne and Nick Gibson have shared the same Wizz Air cockpit
This is your captain speaking. And this is your captain’s husband speaking.
Not the words you’d expect to hear as you buckle up ahead of a trip away, but ones that could crackle through the intercom of Sanne and Nick Gibson’s Wizz Air plane when they happen to be flying together.
The aviators are a vanishingly rare duo who don’t just work for the same company, but do exactly the same job. Sometimes in the same cockpit.
They are veteran captains for the Hungarian budget airline, both based at its UK base in Luton. They start work at the same time, jumping out of bed in the small hours, heading to the airport and skillfully flying a plane load of people to one of the 190 or so airports Wizz Air serves, before heading back to the UK again after a short 35-minute break.
Impressively, Sanne, 31, and her 33-year-old husband manage to make it back from Budapest, Corfu, Rome or wherever they happen to be going that day in time to pick up their 1.5-year-old daughter from nursery.
Having known each other for more than 10 years has its advantages when it comes to working together. When they first joined one another in the cockpit, the professional connection was instant.
“We didn’t have to understand each other first. I knew Sanne’s thought process before it came out of her mouth. I couldn’t have asked for a better co-pilot, because you know each other so well, you understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses,” Nick, from Leeds, explained.
It seems to be true what they (might) say: couples that fly together, stay together.
Sanne and Nick’s soaring romance began in 2015 when they met at pilot school in Arizona. “Away from the prying eyes of parents,” for the first time and beneath the scorching desert sun, the Yorkshire lad and Dutch woman hit it off one evening around a pool after a hard day’s flying.
They exchanged bucket lists, Nick impressing Sanne with boasts of a police ride-along he’d secured in a chance encounter with a cop.
Wings earned, what had remained a friendship in the US blossomed into a romance in the UK, where Nick took Sanne for her first Nando’s on their first date. From then, they may well have been inseparable – had the fast-paced, demanding life of a young pilot not got in the way.
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He scored a job in Munich, and she in Strasbourg, meaning they were a two-hour drive apart. When Sanne later landed a gig in Toulouse, Nick managed to transfer to Bristol so he could do night layovers in the French city.
And then, when Sanne secured a job at Wizz Air in 2017 and Nick the year after, the couple had achieved their ambition of working from the same base for the first time. “I know other people in this job had been at it for ten years trying to get to the same place,” Nick explained.
On his very first flight as a captain, Sanne was there alongside Nick as his co-pilot.
“Sometimes I have to pinch myself that we live together. And we get home every night. I am so lucky,” Sanne said.
The couple’s rotas are aligned, meaning they both work five days on and then four days off. They have permanent, live-in childcare for five days when they’re at work – something they say is crucial to them getting enough sleep to be ready to fly.
“The mum guilt is a real thing, but I think it’s a really important thing to keep going. Flying is a perishable skill; if you don’t fly, you lose it. It’s not like riding a bike. I remember that first takeoff after maternity leave, I was halfway down the runway before I got my head in the game,” Sanne said.
While Nick and Sanne do fly together, they don’t do so all the time. In fact, it’s a chance when they do end up in the same cockpit. “We don’t push for it, but it is quite nice. It was just us, no daughter, no phones. We just sat there and had a chat,” Nick said.
Both are quick to note that they’ve never had a domestic while behind the controls, despite Sanne noticing that Nick does sometimes make a loud whistling sound into the microphone when he’s flying.
They also resist doing a ‘his and hers’ bit to the cabin over the intercom, for fear it’d freak out passengers concerned that they aren’t taking their jobs seriously enough.
Looking to the future, the husband and wife won’t be flying together anytime soon. Because Sanne is due to give birth just before Valentine’s Day.
But after six months of maternity leave, they’ll both be back in the cockpit, jetting off to somewhere sunny together.
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