Before I had even taken my first lesson, I was already in it for $680. "Welcome to aviation!" said the club owner as he handed me my receipt and credit card. I barely heard him, as my head was already buzzing with adrenaline, excitement, and self doubt about the journey on which I had just embarked.
I dove into the textbooks with a ferocity fed on a potent mix of equal parts leg-shaking excitement and heart-sinking dread of doing something stupid and somehow ruining this dream. Much of what I was reading was familiar from years of model airplanes, flight simulators, talking to pilots and having an aeronautical engineer for a dad. My first lesson was scheduled for a week thence, and the hours of studying were a useful way to bridle my anticipation of soaring at over 2,000 feet(!), and peeling the paint off the cowling at over 90(!) knots.
The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship
I was like a kid on Christmas Eve the night before my first lesson. Sleep was more or less out of the question, which was fine since I would be functioning purely on adrenaline and caffeine anyhow and a rested mind would have been overkill. Looking at the sky, I saw some low clouds (uh oh), and the flags standing taught at their stays (double uh-oh). I kept a positive outlook (maybe the wind will die! Those clouds have got to lift as it warms up!), but my erstwhile instructor had already decided to scrub the flight before I got to the club. It was simply too windy to fly comfortably or safely, so as much as we WANTED to go, it just wasn't a smart decision. This was my first good lesson in ADM - Aeronautical Decision Making. "It's always better to be down here and wishing you were up there, than to be up there wishing you were down here."
What's worse than getting winded out was when we looked at my instructor's calendar. He was absolutely slammed, with very few openings for me to get any flying in for at least six weeks! This did not jibe with my plans at all, and I let him know. I didn't want to fire him before we'd even started, but I came to learn to fly, like, yesterday.
With a sigh, he said "I hate to lose such a motivated student, but I don't want to frustrate you. However, it looks like Fiona has weekdays and some weekends available right now. Fiona, do you have time for another student?"
Fiona looked up from the reception desk she had been flying all morning and said, "Yes, I believe I do."
Sierra Hotel with Ice Water for Blood
A lot is made of Naval Aviators landing on aircraft carriers in the dead of night in foul weather. Much ballyhooing is made of steely-eyed airmen flying unflinchingly through flak so thick you can walk on it. Neither of these breeds nearly embody "pilot" to me more than a CFI.
It takes a certain personality to get into an underpowered, thirty-year-old airplane with a person of absolutely no experience or flying skill, and allow them to attempt to kill you every five minutes by doing something completely idiotic, all the while only offering helpful pointers in a calm manner and showing no outward signs of panic.
God help me I'd like to be that cool some day.
Logging Hours
The life of a pilot is measured in hours. To land any kind of a paying gig requires logged hours, which requires time in an airplane, which costs money. Flying is not like some civilian job where you can aggrandize your skills and experience a little and make up for it with hard work and quick thinking later. People hiring pilots don't take your claim that "ya sure I can fly that thing" as assurance that you are actually qualified to pilot their G650. They want to see your logbook, and there is no lying on that. I haven't looked up what the penalty for falsifying log entries is but I imagine it's at least comparable to tearing the tags off of mattresses or illegally duplicating VHS tapes.
Your first forty hours qualify you for your private pilot license. This is a minimum figure and most people require 50+ to gain the confidence and skill to pass the check ride. Next, you need another fifty or so hours for your instrument rating. High performance and complex aircraft are more hours, then multi-engined, jets, commercial, CFI, CFII, MEII, ATP, and a whole alphabet soup of other ratings. All of this costs gobs of Real Money™. To become an ATP (airline transport pilot), for example, requires at least 1,500 hours as PIC (pilot in command). Obviously I'm not going to be able to afford 1,500 hours in rental multi-engine airplanes, so I'll probably end up flying rubber dogshit out of Hong Kong to pay the bills and make the hours. At least I'll be flying.
For now that is all the distant unknowable future; at the present I'm just trying not to scare Fiona too badly, and endeavoring to soak up as much of her flying skill and knowledge as I can. She's already letting me perform what may generously be called "landings", so I suppose there is some level of confidence there, which gives me the encouragement to keep on keeping on.
Until next time -- straighten up and fly right.
No comments:
Post a Comment