Pamela Almand used to pilot 747s for a living. Now she’s flying high with a second career as narrator and voiceover actor.

The voice of CW McCoy in Peak Season, Pam has a voice and delivery perfectly suited to strong female leads in the mystery/suspense genre. I’m impressed with how she captures the spirit of CW McCoy and imbues each character with a unique voice. We hear the anguish of Anita Church and the flippant Jersey girl in CW’s neighbor, Cheryl Finzi. As for the male voices, Pam renders them with suitable gravitas but avoids descending into caricature. Hers is an expressive reading that captures every nuance of the dialog.

I interviewed Pam about her career and her company, The Captain’s Voice, via email in late October. Here, in Part 1, she talks about how a career in flying has helped her second career as a narrator take off. In Part 2, which will post later, she hones in on the joys and trials of audiobook narration.

Tell us a bit about the path you took to a career in voice acting and audiobook narration.

My career path has really run the gamut. After a BFA degree in graphic design from Colorado State, I took a flying lesson and got completely hooked. Although at the time there were no female airline pilots, I abandoned the art degree and built my flight time quickly. I did everything from flying single-engine aircraft solo across the Atlantic to being a production test pilot for a business jet manufacturer and eventually became an airline pilot.

In 1995, I was asked to do a national Tylenol TV commercial—fun and very lucrative—and that cascaded to jobs here and there: spots for Northwest Airlines, narrating training videos, doing occasional narration for clients all over the world, all the while toying with the idea of a full-time voiceover career.

When I had to temporarily stop flying for medical reasons, I built a professional recording studio and built my occasional hobby into a full-time business. Although I wasn’t able to go back to flying and finally retired this year, I’ve been tremendously blessed to have had two careers that I passionately love.

You piloted a commercial airliner. How has that influenced your audio work?

You know, the perseverance and drive and just plain hard work it took to get on with a major international airline as a woman has served me well in building this business. And as a 747 captain flying all over the world, I caught a lot of grief and teasing from my male colleagues, which helped me develop a thick skin and a sense of humor, traits I find useful in just about anything I’ve ever accomplished.

The most tangible carryover from flying to voiceover is the asset, for a female pilot, of having a low-pitched voice. I think after hearing a few high, squeaky female voices on the radio frequencies I unconsciously deepened my tone, not only for the added gravitas, but for that air of calm authority you expect from an airline captain. I never added the stereotyped Chuck Yeager drawl, though.

And although English is the required aviation language, excellent diction is as essential in international aviation communications as it is for professional voiceover and audiobooks. Think about trying to radio your situation to a Chinese or Russian air traffic controller.

How does audiobook narration differ from your other projects?

Audiobook narration is far more of a storytelling style than normal voiceover work. And in commercials, e-learning, video narration and other voiceover work, I’m rarely called upon to be a male character or to carry on a conversation with myself.

What’s the most challenging part of your job?

I truly think, to me, fictional audiobooks are a great challenge. You have such an enormous wealth of characters, personalities and voices possible in a span of an 8-12 hour book, it’s a job to keep them straight, to jump from character to character, and simply to keep the stamina required to do hours of recording without the energy fading.

My other voiceover work is broken up into 30-second, 60-second TV or radio spots, shorter narrations, phone messaging systems, e-learning projects (which can sometimes get as long as an audiobook) or videogame voices and it breaks up the recording and editing sessions into much shorter blocks. And, of course, those usually only involve being me.

What do you like best about your job?

That’s a hard one. What I think I’m most passionate about, though, is the variety of subject matter I get to read and learn about.

As a case in point, I had a week where I voiced the phone messaging system for The Hotels and Casinos of Monte Carlo; signed a contract to record a contemporary Christian romance audiobook called Come To Me Alive; narrated a series on medicinal marijuana; recorded pickups for a national infomercial for CamiShaper by Genie; and was the voice of Abraham’s 95-year-old wife Sara for a Biblical video game called Stained Glass. (I wasn’t sure if I should be flattered when they loved my audition for that one.)

Do you have any disasters you’d care to share?

Oh, many, but my clients are loyal and the only harm has been to my pride. On one of my very first audiobooks, a reviewer on Amazon said she couldn’t stand my voice and couldn’t listen to the rest of the book. Ouch. I later found everybody gets these occasionally, so I just worked on that thick-skin-sense-of-humor trait…but also modified a couple of things based on her other comments. I can learn from the nastiest of reviewers as well as the positive ones.

And, of course, I look back on some of my earlier work and cringe at things sometimes, but I do try to never stop growing and learning and honing my voice and my craft. I always learn from coaching sessions with Pat Fraley, Johnny Heller, Carol Monda, Marc Cashman, Paul Ruben and other narrators I really admire.

Next: juggling multiple personalities without going crazy.