One day he could be flying top businessmen and celebrities around the world. The next day might involve everything from training his pilots to doing important paperwork back at base.

But there is one thing for sure — Marty Amick's job is anything but boring.

For Longtail Aviation's head of flight operations, who runs a team of 12 at the company's headquarters in Southside, as well as two pilots and a mechanical engineer in Switzerland and three staff at its operation in Halifax, Canada, in total comprising two of its own aircraft and numerous planes operated for other companies, manages regulations and develops programmes, manuals and procedures to comply with those regulations in addition to flying its private jets anything up to 60 hours a week.

"I love to fly — I wouldn't be here if I didn't," he said. "It is my passion and it is what keeps me doing this.

"A day in my life could involve sitting at a desk working or it could mean flying an airline around the world and I like both aspects of the job.

"We do everything from short trips to New York to global missions to South Africa, Tokyo or India and those are the missions that I find the most challenging and interesting.

"For example, next month, within a period of about a week, I will fly to Western Africa, Southern Africa, Kenya, India, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, London and Bermuda."

By his own admission, Mr. Amick never intended to get into the aviation industry as a career, but he developed a fascination for planes while in grammar school.

Wanting to understand more about what makes planes fly, he picked up a US army flight manual one day and after studying it decided to take up flight lessons at high school, becoming a licensed pilot at the age of 16. Next Mr. Amick went to Yale University to study English literature, but continued to look for any opportunities to fly, which brought him to a flight company in Maine where he attained his instrument rating (allowing him to fly in bad weather and in clouds and to make approaches and landings effectively blind), commercial licence and flight instructor rating, and he was offered a job as a flight instructor.

Naturally he jumped at the chance to work in his dream job and then took over a larger flight school in Portland, Maine, before a chance sale of a Cessna aircraft to a student opened up an avenue as an aeroplane salesman.

However, Mr. Amick soon thought it was time to put his first love of flying to one side and pursue a "proper career", enrolling in a course at the University of Maine Law School in 1980, while keeping up his interest in aviation as a part-time pilot, a passion he found hard to give up and one which he followed again after quitting his post at a law firm in Portland and moving to an airline called Northwest Airlink in Boston as a captain.

He worked there for three-and-a-half years until the company was made bankrupt and shut down in 1995, but he was having so much fun he set up an airline named Charter Fleet International in the line of managing and chartering business jets.

It was not until Mark Byrne, fellow pilot and chairman of reinsurance firm Flagstone Re, gave him a call asking if he was interested in coming to Bermuda to start up Longtail in 2003, which he duly did, establishing the first air carrier certificated on the Island in modern times.

"I am very proud of the accomplishment of establishing Longtail aviation," he said.

"It was much more challenging than I had ever expected it to be, and it would have been quite impossible without the support, resources and boundless energy of Mark Byrne.

"I had set up similar companies in the US, so I was fairly knowledgeable with the process, but my prior experience was with air carriers which operate under US rules.

"In Bermuda I found a blend of European rules and unique Bermuda requirements, with a few US requirements thrown in. The Bermuda Department of Civil Aviation on the one hand wanted to make sure that they did their job in a conscientious manner as a regulator, but since it hadn't been done here in Bermuda for three or four decades, they were breaking new ground themselves, I think it would be fair to say that they erred on the side of caution to ensure that their first certified air carrier was properly organised and that they could be sure it was safe and that it would be operated to very high standards."

Another proud moment for Mr. Amick was when Longtail became the first ever non-US certified air carrier to achieve an Aviation Research Group/US Inc. gold rating and a few months later it was also number one in the queue to receive a platinum rating.

Among the biggest changes he has seen during his time in the aviation sector has been the advance in technology from 1968 when he first started out flying, to the state-of-the-art equipment at a pilot's fingertips today such as systems which literally allow them to see through clouds. Equally, he views the integration of that technology in the future as one of the greatest challenges facing the world of aviation. He also believes that in our lifetimes we may see the end of jet fuel and its replacement by the use of pressurised hydrocarbon.

"A comparison of the performance of our two jet aircraft, for example, shows how rapidly technology is advancing. Our oldest jet, a Westwind, has two engines. The newer jet, a Falcon 900, has three engines, yet it burns less fuel per hour than the smaller Westwind and goes faster and nearly twice as far," he said.

Other developments include a greater understanding of the importance of human interaction in flight safety and operation, and advancements in the use of highly realistic flight simulators for practising and training both normal and emergency procedures.

"My job as head of flight operations is to oversee everything that happens in the cockpit and make sure it is done to the highest professional standards of safety and reliability," he said.

One of his most exciting and interesting experiences at the wheel of an aircraft was to get clearance from the Royal Air Force and US Air Force to land on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, a volcanic island which was completely submerged until 600 years ago, in addition to touching down at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya, flying over the picturesque Swiss Alps and the challenges of navigating his way through Russian airspace.

"In fact, it is not uncommon for us to go on a mission in a week which skirts the edge of the Arctic Circle and a few days later be on the cusp of the Antarctic Circle as we work our way around the world," he said.

"My personal ambition is to continue flying for as long as I can and to do that in an exciting and cutting edge context."

Mr. Amick, who lives in St. David's with his wife Callie and their 13-year-old son Isaac, who attends Somersfield Academy, likes to go scuba diving and sailing as well as playing and listening to music and pursuing his interest in science in his spare time, and even met up his violin teacher, who took him for his first plane ride in 1968, 40 years later.

"I thanked him for the gifts he had given me and was pleased to be able to tell him I still fly planes and still play the violin," he said. But it is the skies where his real heart lies, and he hopes to keep pushing the frontiers of aviation for many years to come as Longtail Aviation continues to flourish as one of the leading lights in private jet aviation in Bermuda.