St-Lazare resident Raymond Oesterreich is a master at resilience. When the going gets tough in one area, he moves to another.

In 2008, Oesterreich had been laid off from his then day job at an aerospace maintenance company.

“But three weeks later, I was driving a cement truck, which is not something I had ever done before. I got my Class 3 truck licence and did that for nearly a year,” says Oesterreich, 54. “I had a family to support and bills to pay. You do what you have to do. No time for woe is me.”

Oesterreich later found work again with another company in the aerospace industry. And he continues to toil as a maintenance instructor for Flight Safety International on Pratt & Whitney engines, imparting his knowledge of maintaining them to those in the military and private sectors, both locally and internationally.

But business in the trade got, understandably, slow over the course of the pandemic with air traffic much curtailed. And while Oesterreich is still on the job in a more limited capacity, he found himself with free time on his hands.

So he pivoted into another mode of transport and another of his passions, cycling, where business is booming.

“There’s been a huge slowdown in the aerospace industry in general. My job typically requires international travel of 20 to 22 weeks a year. Instead of a company sending 10 people to Montreal, they would send me to Indonesia or Australia, anywhere in the world to do the teaching.”

Now it’s essentially online, since he hasn’t been flying for over a year. But he has been hitting the road on his bike, both for recreation and making the 13-kilometre trek to Giant Vaudreuil in Vaudreuil-Dorion, where he works three days a week selling and maintaining bicycles.

Giant, incidentally, is not a reference to the outsized physical stature of the shop’s clientele, but rather it’s the brand name of the bikes sold and maintained there.