16 November 2025
The Sky’s the Limit
Manawanuitanga. Against The Grain.
WRITER: JACQUELINE FORSTER
photographer: FRANCINE BOER
Aircraft maintenance engineer Debbie Garlick grew up tinkering with machines alongside her helicopter pilot dad in the small Southland town of Tuatapere. Encouraged by her family to pursue her aviation dreams, Debbie joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force at just seventeen and, from there, her career took off.
“I’ve had an interest in aviation since I was a child,” Debbie recalls. “I grew up taking flights with Dad and helping out around the hangar, and I’ve always liked to fix things, so becoming an aircraft engineer was an obvious career path for me.” Debbie’s first port of call when she joined Te Tauaarangi o Aotearoa Royal New Zealand Air Force was Te Waiharakeke Blenheim for training before being stationed at the Air Force’s Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland base for six years. During that time, she travelled to various places around the world, including Scotland, Dubai and American Sāmoa, working on P-3 Orions and Seasprite helicopters. “I looked after aircraft used for search and rescue missions,” Debbie says. “We used to send them out when boats went missing up in the islands around Fiji and Sāmoa. When they’d locate a missing fisherman, they’d drop supplies to them and direct the nearest bigger boat to rescue them. Search and rescue planes also conduct flyovers after natural disasters to take photos of the damage for assessment.”
A career highlight for Debbie, 39, was accompanying a P-3 Orion maritime surveillance plane to Antarctica on a patrol mission looking for illegal fishing boats. “It was an amazing experience. We were only supposed to stay one night but the weather turned bad, so we got a bonus day – which gave us the chance to look around the American base as well as New Zealand’s Scott Base. I didn’t go to sleep because it was twenty-four-hour daylight at that time of year.”
Life as an Air Force maintenance engineer presented many challenges for Debbie, but being a woman wasn’t one of them. “I get a lot of job satisfaction from nutting out problems and finding solutions. The only problem I faced as a woman in the Air Force was lack of representation. I don’t know why there aren’t more women in the Air Force; there’s nothing we can’t do. I think I’ve been brought up in a way that modelled that – roles weren’t gendered – you just did what you wanted to do.”
In 2010, Debbie left her high-flying career to embark on another adventure with her now-husband, Paul, a helicopter pilot she met in the Air Force. “We travelled and worked in aviation and non-aviation jobs in England, and in France, where I was a nanny and Paul was a gardener. We ended up in Spain fixing P-3 Orions for Airbus’ military aircraft division.” But home was calling and the pair returned to a more familiar way of life down under, living and working in Wānaka for a while, and then Fiji, before relocating to Te Anau where they later married. “There’s no place like home,” says Debbie. “Our family all live in pretty close proximity, which is great now that we have children.”
Continue reading the full story in our Kōanga Spring 2025 Edition.
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This story appeared in the Kōanga Spring 2025 Edition of Shepherdess.
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