Chicago Jet Group: Meeting Challenges With Innovation and Experience
“Sometimes it’s a struggle, (but) I’m having fun in aviation again.”
Companies, like the lives of the people who give them life, often take unexpected turns. Never an airplane kid, but always interested in things mechanical — go-karts, cars, motorcycles.
— Mike Mitera became an airframe and powerplant mechanic because “it sounded interesting.” He also became a pilot, now rated on a handful of business jets, because the opportunity was there. And, in 2003, sitting in the driveway of someone else’s house in a gated community, minutes from accepting a job he really needed, Mitera instead decided to start his own business, the Chicago Jet Group, a full-service maintenance, management and charter company at Aurora Municipal Airport, a stoplight-free ride 40 minutes west of downtown Chicago.
What the future holds for a company or individual no one can predict with certainty, but good clues are the past decisions that led to the present. After high school, Mitera worked at an Omaha, Neb., service station, which still pumped gas. When a co-worker announced he was making a career change — crossing the Missouri River to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he was enrolled in Iowa Western Community College’s A&P program — Mitera decided to join him…
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