Matt Wright took the long way, but now manages private aviation operations at the Monterey Airport.

Matt Wright, general manager of Monterey Fuel Co. – the parent company of Monterey Jet Center and Del Monte Aviation at the Monterey Airport – took a long and winding path before landing at his current location. He went from working as a practicing lawyer in Nebraska to being a line technician at an airport in Arizona. That’s an obtuse title for someone who cleans windows, dumps out toilets, etc. Then he quickly rose through the ranks to start managing fueling operations and other logistics at airports in the West.

Born in Durham, North Carolina, Wright’s first flight was when he was just 2 weeks old. His dad was immersed in finals week at Duke Law School. His grandfather, who owned a small plane, flew Wright and his parents to Nebraska, where he was raised.

“Some kids love dinosaurs, I loved airplanes,” he says. “I knew all the airlines, all the different types of planes. It just was my passion.”

When he was in high school, his family moved to Southern California, where he took a test mandated in his high school at the time – the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) – a test for the military. He scored well, and recruiters came knocking, saying they had the “best job in the Navy” in mind for him. He was thinking it would be a naval aviator, his dream job. Nope. They wanted him to be a submariner.

“I was like, ‘Are you kidding? I don’t want to be on a nuclear submarine, I want to fly jets.’ And the guy’s like ‘well, sorry son, your vision isn’t in the acceptable range, and you’re never going to be a Navy aviator, an Air Force aviator or a commercial pilot for that matter,’” Wright recalls. “I was crushed.”

He turned down the offer, and says, “I had to go to Plan B, and that was to follow the family path as a fourth-generation attorney. I hated every minute of it.” He quit after a few years, but not before getting his pilot’s license – lawyering money helped facilitate that – and ended up launching a second career in aviation, his calling.

Weekly: What was it like taking the leap of quitting the legal profession and becoming a line technician?

Wright: Before I quit being an attorney, my [first] wife and I got a divorce, which probably added to the whole drama. I decided to have my mid-life crises all at the same time. She was from Arizona, wanted to move [there] with our kids and not live in Nebraska, where nothing was there for her. I moved to Arizona and got a job at an airport. I was in my mid-30s, and I had learned it’s who you know, and connections are always important. I was good at it, and got promoted in pretty short order. Within 12 months I went from being a line tech to general manager.

How did that happen so fast?

It helped that I had an educational background and I could read financial statements. Normally it takes years to figure it out, and how to do a budget, how to manage people – but I had been there and done that in my previous career as an attorney, so I had all of those skills. All I really had to do was learn the aviation side of stuff, which kind of came naturally because I loved it. It was my passion.

You eventually started working for a company that took you to an airport in Anchorage, Alaska. What was it like up there?

I fell in love with the natural beauty of the place. And Anchorage, in the aviation world, is like the Garden of Eden, because it has everything. They don’t have roads that go places in Alaska – they have airplanes.

Where are your favorite places to fly to locally?

There’s so many great places to fly down here. My absolute favorite place is Shelter Cove. It’s in Morro Bay, a super cool airport [west of the] PCH, so there’s not that many people there. There’s a restaurant on the water, it’s a really cool spot.

How would you say the private aviation industry is doing right now?

Business aviation is robust, in part because of the pandemic, and in part because, pre-pandemic, the economy was doing so well. What happened was the economy was flying high and then the pandemic hit and nobody was traveling, and everybody that was still traveling didn’t want to fly on an airline. If they had the money to pay for first class, now they’d pay a little more money to charter a plane [for] just them and their family or business associates.