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After career in aviation, area natives returns home

After career in aviation, area natives returns home

Timothy Salapek, a Warren High School class of 1976 alumnus, has led a diverse life spanning technical engineering careers and creative pursuits in the fine arts. Despite early setbacks preventing him from flying fighter jets in the Air Force, it did not stop him from pursuing his private pilot license later in life.

Before that, he attended the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, then the Technical Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Following tech school in Pittsburgh, Salapek was hired by a firm that sent him directly to their computer and electronic engineering school in Chicago.

Salapek's career began at GTE Automatic Electric in Chicago, then at TRW Inc. (originally Thompson Ramo Wooldridge Inc.), a major American industrial, aerospace, defense, and automotive corporation.

Wanting to expand his technology experience, he then connected with the second-largest telecommunications company in the world, headquartered in Canada, where he was hired by Nortel. While there, he started a business unit that focused on rural telephone companies in America, providing internet services for them in the early 1990s.

Salapek recalled his first airplane ride at Warren Air Park (now Betts Park) with his father. "My love of aviation began with my father, who first introduced me to the world of flight through visits to our local airfield in Warren, Pennsylvania. When we were kids, Dad would take us along to Warren Airpark, where he would spend time socializing with fellow aviation enthusiasts. Aviation was part of his life long before it became part of mine."

He said his father served in the Air Force and worked as a sergeant and aircraft mechanic in San Antonio, Texas, maintaining the legendary P-51 Mustangs. "His experience and enthusiasm planted a seed in me that would grow throughout my life. I can still remember standing behind the chain-link fence, gazing at those big, beautiful airplanes as they soared above the river and treetops. Every takeoff and landing seemed magical.On occasion, dad and his friends would take us for rides, giving us what felt like the best view in the world."

Salapek described those early experiences as unforgettable, with the powerful sound of the engines and the graceful way the airplanes floated through the sky, and even the distinctive squeak of the tires as they touched down on the runway. "Even as a young boy, I felt a sense of wonder and excitement that was difficult to put into words." He said that those moments left an impression far deeper than he could have understood at the time. Childhood visits to a small local airfield became the foundation of his lifelong passion with aviation.

He stated, "The excitement never left me. In many ways, I believe my journey as a pilot began long before I ever sat in the cockpit. It began at a chain-link fence in Warren, standing beside my father, looking up at the sky."

During his time working for Nortel in the Independent operating companies' realm, Salapek also pursued working on his Private Pilot Instrument license. Once that was achieved, he once told his boss "I could visit two customers in one day if you let me fly my own plane."

Able to prove it was doable, Salapek spent a decade in travel touching down in nearly every small town on the east coast.

As a member, he flew for a company called AirLifeLine, where pilots donated their planes and their time to fly patients, primarily young children, to hospitals for surgeries.

While volunteering his time for that, he planned his business trips along with those flights.

Next came the move to focus on high-tech opportunities in Raleigh, NC where he built a cloud-computing business unit for Nortel globally, providing TaaS (Telecommunications as a Service) throughout the U.S. and Europe.

While at Nortel as a young engineer, NASA Jet Propulsion Labs needed an application to run the Voyager space program remotely for their disaster recovery plans in the case of earthquakes or other disasters. Salapek, alongside a small team of colleagues, worked to develop software to work with high-speed internet connections for remote work which was significant for when the North Ridge Earthquake hit in 1994.

Following the completion of that project, he spent two years commuting between North Carolina and Alaska designing and managing the implementation of the state's first voice-data-video fiber-optic network, applications and services. While working in the Pacific Northwest, he also expanded his aviation skills by learning to fly floatplanes.

With his return to his roots in Warren, brought his journey full circle, blending a major career transition with a heartwarming milestone in his personal life. After establishing a highly successful technology career in the tech hub of Raleigh, N.C., Salapek ultimately decided to relocate back to his hometown after a meaningful reconnection with his junior high school sweetheart, Lora, at a class reunion. The two rekindled their relationship and are now newlyweds, marking the beginning of an exciting new chapter together back where it all started.

While being deeply involved in technology, Salapek found other outlets in several artistic areas during his free time, including writing.

After four published short stories, Salapek is working on the completion of his first memoir titled "Clear Skies with a Lucky Tailwind: Memoirs of a Private Pilot; More Than a Hobby: One Pilot's Sky-Bound Memoir of Passion, Adventure, and Service."

In an excerpt, Salapek describes an incident that earned him an award for heroism issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Aviation Administration Eastern Region.

"It was September 10, 1994. I called Raleigh AWOS for a weather update before departing Raleigh-Durham International Airport (KRDU) for Jamestown, New York (KJHW). It was a Saturday morning, and the skies were clear. The local barometric pressure was 30.20 inches, but a slow-moving front was approaching southern Pennsylvania from the west. I had previous training and Pilot in Command experience in a Mooney. I knew the aircraft, and I understood what could happen if an aircraft remained in an uncontrolled climb while the pilot was being affected by hypoxia. There might be only minutes to solve the problem. This is where training matters. In life, learning anything takes focus, discipline, and memory. But most of us don't think about what we learn as potentially being a matter of life or death--unless we are doctors, nurses, firefighters, pilots, or others whose professions can put them in that position. During my training, I tried to give one hundred percent of my attention to learning the aircraft. I wanted to understand not only what to do, but why I was doing it. I learned where things were located -- not just by sight, but by touch. In an emergency, there isn't always time to stop and think. You have to remember. I mentally placed myself in the left seat of that Mooney. I began talking the young woman through the emergency, flying the aircraft, and ultimately ending with a safe landing."

Beyond his adventures in aviation and exploration in writing, he also channeled his creativity into songwriting. He frequently writes songs rooted in his love for the local region, including a song written for his recently celebrated high school class reunion and "88 Steps," a track inspired by the exact number of steps found at Warren's scenic Rimrock Trail. In addition, songs titled "The Allegheny Guides us Home" and "Allegheny Christmas," can be found on his YouTube channel.

His songwriting passion led him to pitch a track to Scotty McCreary's manager. While the manager loved the lyrics, he ultimately had to turn the song down because Salapek was not a member of the Nashville Songwriters Guild. Refusing to let the rejection slow him down, his characteristic perseverance kicked in: he signed up for the guild the very next day! Reflecting on the experience, he noted, "It's fun to dabble and do things like that, and meet new people."

Salapek plays the harmonica as well as the cajón (a box-shaped percussion instrument typically used in acoustic sessions). Painting and photography are two more hobbies that he is actively enjoying.

Locally, he has utilized his visibility to support community causes, including sleeping outside in a tent during a winter storm to raise global corporate awareness for youth housing and homelessness. Last month, Salapek organized the Friendship Walk on the opening night of "Come From Away" to demonstrate the friendship between the U.S. and Canada.

Paving his own path to success, Salapek proved that raw experience can easily outweigh a formal degree. Defying the closed doors of his early life, he went on to soar in the technology realm while keeping his passion for aviation alive in the cockpit.

Today, Tim and Lora are fully embracing retirement and the next chapter of their lives together in Warren. They enjoy being close to family, as both of their siblings also reside in the area, and they take great pride in caring for the beautiful local home they purchased and completely restored over the last six years. Through his ongoing passions for writing, photography, aviation, and travel, Tim continues to capture the rich moments, memories, and meaning found along life's journey.

Drawing from a lifetime of experiences, Salapek shares a powerful piece of wisdom in his memoir: "Kids have to understand that the road they travel may not end up being the road they end up taking. My life has had a lot of turns along the way to get where I have ended up being."