Logan swaps the groundwork for the sky up north
Ainslee was named a youth category winner at the 2025 Shine Awards.
AINSLEE Logan grew up in South Gippsland and is now a helicopter pilot, flying a Robinson R 22. For Ainslee, a gap year that began as a detour to the Northern Territory became the turning point of her career, where she has since gone on to win the 2025 Youth Shine Award in the aviation industry.
Life as a station hand quickly reshaped not only her daily rhythm but her ambition. With initial plans to study midwifery after graduating from Mary MacKillop College in Leongatha in 2020, Ainslee instead took on a second year up North helping run the crew.
“When I left secondary school, I needed a gap year, because I knew that if I was to start studying straight away, I would probably never finish it as I was so burnt out from high school during COVID. A friend was headed to a station in Queensland, and I thought, well, that sounds good. I looked into it further and applied to whatever I could find until someone took me,” said Ainslee.
Growing up in Leongatha, every chance she got, including weekends and school holidays, Ainslee would go out to the family dairy farm that has now been in the Dowlings for over 100 years, so station work seemed a natural fit, and exposure to large-scale mustering (including helicopter operations) soon took Ainslee’s interest. “It was the aerial mustering that drove me to pursue pilot training,” she said.
“I was working on the ground at a cattle station. Mustering a property that covered over a million acres, with roughly a quarter as pastoral land.”
Daily duties for Ainslee included mustering on horseback, with choppers and buggies, yard work - drafting, processing, marking, and operating machinery; her job was uncompromisingly practical – experience she later identified as essential to aerial mustering.
Helicopters are part of the process on a large-scale property; from the air, crews muster mobs of cattle, and work in close contact with the ground crew to ensure they can get them into the yards as low-stress and efficiently as possible.
“It was in the Northern Territory that I decided that I wanted to fly helicopters, but obviously it’s expensive, and then halfway through my second year on the station, I decided I would sacrifice and go all in,” said Ainslee.
“It was one afternoon; I asked my manager if one of the boys wouldn’t mind taking me out to see what it’s like from the air. When they landed, they looked over at me and said, so, what do you reckon, we turned you off yet? – but no, it was quite the opposite, I thought I’m going all in now.”
Ainslee then made the move to Western Australia, working as a station hand through 2023 at a property that had two helicopters. She’d started her theory before heading to Perth and finished training in May 2024.
In Perth, Ainslee was finishing her theory and flying once a week, using that as a break from study to keep herself motivated. “However, once I had finished all seven subjects, I flew twice a day, six days a week, to get through the required 105 hours. It wasn’t easy, but at the end of the day, nothing in life is easy. It’s just one of those things; if you want something, you’ve got to stick with it, and eventually it’ll happen if you’re willing to put the work in.”
“I’d always grown up around cattle, but dairy farming and beef farming in South Gippsland is small-scale compared to big station living,” she said. “I get to meet so many different people, and travel to so many different places. Our work depends on what’s happening for the season; it’s all dependent on the rain and what the markets are doing.”
Ainslee is now 23 years old, working as a mustering pilot contractor for Fitzroy Helicopters in Fitzroy Crossing, Western Australia, and was named a youth category winner at the 2025 Shine Awards, recognised for her grit and determination in the aviation industry for her work in the Kimberley.
A career that she hadn’t planned on but took her by surprise.
