Beyond the Flightdeck

What he found was a majestic country, its verdant highlands and proud history at odds with its media image as a famine-stalked wasteland, but a land nevertheless struggling to emerge from decades of conflict and the more recent toll of the AIDS epidemic.

Hucker’s first trip would not be his last, and as he continued to visit during his time off, hopping aboard the four-hour flight from Dubai to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa with increasing regularity, he began to look for ways to help, pitching in on renovations of an orphanage housing children whose parents had died of AIDS.

Among the roughly 5. 5 million Ethiopian children who have lost at least one parent, more than 800,000 are believed to have been orphaned by AIDS. Many of those spent months or years of their childhood nursing a dying parent. Some had contracted the virus themselves.

“When you hear their stories, some of them are pretty hard,” Hucker says. “I’ve certainly cried some silent tears over what they’ve seen in their young lives. Kids shouldn’t have to go through what they’ve gone through. ” Though the orphanage did its best, it lacked the resources togive children individual attention, and many of the orphans had little chance of being adopted, either because they were too old or because of the stigma often attached to HIV and AIDS. After arranging to get the orphanage a free supply of badly needed HIV medicines by reaching out to a local hospital and the United Nations, Hucker drew on a growing network of personal and professional contacts to tackle a more difficult problem: how to go beyond providing the barest essentials in order to give children a shot at a better future.

For two years beginning in earnest in 2005, Hucker worked on a model that would try to do just that. Reaching out to a range of international experts, he eventually settled on a ‘kinship’ approach that provides funding for children who are placed into foster care with, whenever possible, members of their own extended families.

“The idea is that many children have family members who would like to take care of them but who simply don’t have the resources, so we provide the resources,” Hucker says.

Beyond the Orphanage, as the organisation is known, has grown to support 57 children at present, providing foster carers with about $2,000 per child for food, clothing and education. Because in many cases that money also helps foster families better support their other children, Hucker says the organisation currently has about 200 children “in its orbit”.

“Everybody in the house will benefit from the child being in the program,” he says, an impact that helps to bolster the family’s support for their involvement.

In addition to the direct support it provides to foster families, the program includes a drop-in centre funded by Emirates, which offers counselling services, life-skills training, after-school tutoring and other activities. While someparticipants have fallen too far behind to finish high school, all remain in the program until they have completed professional or vocational training and been placed in a job.

“Because many of them do face that stigma,” Hucker says, “one of the most important things we can do for them is to advocate for them with employers and help them get that first job. ” The program’s Ethiopian staff also work to ensure that participants are being adequately supported at home, conducting both formal and informal checks. “The amount of work we put into that is a point of difference” with other aid programs, he says.

But Hucker says he’s also taken on board broader criticisms of Western aid programs in developing countries – that they often duplicate existing efforts, stymie the growth of local capacity, seek to impose foreign values and, in sum, are more about donors than recipients. He credits the program’s family-based structure in helping to win the support of the Ethiopian government and local aid groups.

“We work in parallel with the government. They have agencies – not to the same level as Australia – but they have them, and they’ve been very supportive, very committed to the program,” he says. “Keeping the family structure together is a big part of that support. Organisationally it’s all about developing Ethiopians to help Ethiopians. All our staff in Ethiopia are Ethiopians. It’s really about developing them to look after themselves and us doing no harm. ” With the program up and running by 2007, Hucker travelled to Ehiopia at least once a month while continuing to captain Airbus A330 and A340 aircraft for Emirates. In 2008, he moved to Qantas, taking part in the check and training program for A380 pilots, then in 2010 took a job with Tiger Airways, where he remains as an A320 captain based from Melbourne.

From his start as an instructor at the Canberra Aero Club to early stints with airlines in Papua New Guinea and with China’s Dragonair, the Torquay native has racked up 12,000 flying hours over a 20-year career, touching down in most of the world’s largest commercial airports and many of its most obscure – from Yemen and Iran to Pakistan and PNG.

His many aviation connections helped in pulling together a fund-raising raffle in December that offered two winners time in A320 and a RAAF Hawk jet trainer flight simulators, the latter of which is not normally available to civilians.

Though Hucker’s visits to Ethiopia are now less frequent, he continues to make the trip a few times a year and works on Beyond the Orphanage every day. “It keeps me pretty busy, but fortunately we have a great board and great volunteers, most of whom work also full-time. ” Of the roughly 1,000 orphans who have been supported by the program, Hucker says, he’s gotten to know many very well, watching them grow over a number of years. Some have gone on to complete university degrees, an achievement that “makes every second of our work worth it,” he says. Others have returned to the program as mentors.

So far, though, none have become pilots.

“I’m hoping,” Hucker laughs. “Ethiopian [Airlines] is expanding. They’re starting a pilot training program. Of course I would love it if a kid wanted to go along those lines, but we’ll help them the best we can, whatever they want to do. ”