Students who attend California State University, Northridge come from a variety of backgrounds, and many of them live a double life of school and work. For Brian Dinelli ’76 (Geography), his job during his time at CSUN equaled his outlook on his future: The sky’s the limit! That’s because he taught flying lessons to chart his course to the Matador graduation stage.

If you’re walking around the CSUN campus, odds are you’ll hear the sound of a plane cutting the atmosphere overhead. The Van Nuys airport sits less than five miles away, the perfect place for Dinelli, a Valley kid, to continue his love of flying while earning his degree.

“I was instructing before I got to CSUN,” Dinelli said from his home in Washington state. “It was an excellent way to build flight hours, earn money while doing it and really cement what I had learned in the process leading up to it.

“I had dreamt of flying since I was 6 or 7 years old,” he said. “I grew up in Pacoima just a few blocks from Whiteman Airport, and started flying in 1971 with earnings from my job as a busboy — earning my private pilot license at 17. The Air Explorer Squadron at Van Nuys was instrumental in helping me achieve my goals. Volunteer flight instructors mentored many teenage would-be pilots, and I was fortunate to be one of them.”

When it was time to choose a university, Dinelli knew CSUN was for him. It was close to his Granada Hills home and the Van Nuys Airport where he was instructing. Ever the explorer, he chose geography to study all the places he would go as a pilot — a profession he said he knew he would choose after graduation, thanks to his “passion fueled by the sense of adventure and travel to faraway places.”

But with a full course load, how did he make time to find clients?

“Mostly word of mouth.” Dinelli said. “In the early 1970s, the general aviation environment was thriving in Southern California, so getting students was easy. Many of them were Air Explorer teens, but I also had housewives, middle-aged businessmen, foreigners in the U.S. to get their ratings and everything in between.”

After graduating, Dinelli went on to fly professionally, first for the defunct Braniff Airlines, then Alaska Airlines, where he’s been a captain for 29 years. But he still remembers the kid who went to CSUN and charted his career for a life in the skies.

“I would typically get off of work at midnight or so on weekends,” Dinelli said. “Frequently, I would go to [Simi Valley’s] San Val Aviation to spend another several hours viewing training tapes/slides into the wee hours of the morning. It was a labor of love. Forty-three years later, I am just as enchanted with flying as I was when I was watching that training material as a starry-eyed 16-year-old. I found the right vocation, and I am very thankful.”

Alumni