September 2004
I was 17 years old and having the time of my life. I had been a line boy in Lakeland since I was 15 and was cashing in on the experience by being allowed to go to Wichita and pick up a new airplane. The instructors working at our FBO were too busy instructing, so it fell to us line boy/pilots to do the free ferrying work.
The Cessna 150, N1515Q, was white with a light blue trim and had blue stripes painted on the wing roots. It even smelled new—and with the five or six cases of Coors the Cessna rep had purchased and carefully loaded for me, I was pretty close to max gross when I lifted off from Strother Field for the trip home to Florida.
I had made a few of these trips during that year. School was not-so-hot-so, what with the race riots, violence in the classrooms, and day after day of suspended classes for various socio-political events like war protests. I was getting a much better education trying to fly from Kansas to Florida VFR in the wintertime.
There is nothing like a very long VFR flight in cold, rainy and snowy weather to help a 70-hour private pilot learn important things. Things like how to follow interstate highways, railroad tracks and rivers and learning how to read the name of towns off water towers and barn roofs.
And it’s important to know what rime ice really looks like when it accumulates on the leading edge of your wing. Weather was a big part of these journeys. On my first trip to pick up the flight school’s new 172 a few months earlier, I was weathered in at Jackson, Miss. for two days by low clouds and even lower visibility.
Not only was this a great way to learn the potential value of having an instrument rating, it was also a time for me to learn other important things. The local flight service station personnel took me in as a lost waif. I was spending all day there anyway, waiting for a good weather report and generally bugging the specialists, so they put my time to use. It was there that I took my first weather observation, learned how a DF steer really worked and released my very first (and last) weather balloon.
On this trip with the new 150, I was about to learn a very important lesson in scud running. Just outside of Vicksburg, Miss., I was down very low under the cloud deck with very little visibility. Following the highway, I was hoping that the ceiling and viz would pick up a little bit after I crossed the Big Muddy and headed eastbound.
I had been flying a very long time already that day barely sneaking into various airports as the weather forced me to probe and then retreat. You really learn how to read a Sectional Chart and obstacle clearances when you are down low in a light rain and can’t fly instruments. I had been pushing my luck and was entering one of those times in a pilot’s life where he or she is about to get very lucky and learn something, or very unlucky—and die.
Lower and lower I went, staying to the right side of the highway in case some other person as stupid as me was coming the other way. The road cut between two hills and I was flying in between them over the road when I saw it. It was a Confederate General on a marble horse. Sword held high, he was leading some sort of charge.
I don’t remember the name of the general being feted with this stone memorial. What I do remember was that he was higher than I was because I had to lift a wing and look up and see him. Hmmm. It was then that I had a revelation. If dead stone Confederate generals on horses were higher than I was maybe it was time to turn back, find a nice little airport and wait for the weather to get better.
A real educational experience, and I didn’t have to fly into a hill and die to learn it. A lot of beginning pilots don’t get a chance like that. In equestrian sports when a rider is on a horse he or she is too inexperienced to ride or is looking at a series of jumps they aren’t really qualified to attempt, we say that they are “over faced.”
For some pilots, the first time they are over faced is also the last because they are killed. It is a Catch-22 that every pilot needs experience in order to get more knowledge but needs a good foundation of knowledge in order to get experience. Like any other endeavor, the only way to get experience is to, well, experience it. I know that sounds trite, but stick with me here a minute.
The world of professional writing and just about every other activity faces the same hurdle. In order to be published you must have been published before. In order to get that fancy business job it is important that you have experience with fancy businesses. Just taking a writer’s course or getting a business degree is not enough to let you play with the big boys in any area of life.
In other words, book learning is fine and good but real life experience is what makes the pro. We live in an aviation world where a few months and 50 or 60,000 dollars can take you from zero-time student to professional pilot and instructor.
Now, before you begin writing your letter to me telling me how much you know even though you only have 300 hours, I want you to know that I am on your side. I, too, was once a low-time CFI. The way to build time for me was to teach other people how to fly. I’ll say it again. The only way to get experience in flying is to fly.
If you are a low-time instructor, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have the knowledge or the expertise to impart it to your students. All I am saying is that as you teach your students to respect their limits that you in turn respect yours.
All of the pilots I fly with on the airline are seasoned and very experienced professionals. They either found their way to the airline cockpit through the rigors of a military program which usually involved the crucible of combat or they came up the way I did—very slowly through the General Aviation ranks.
In the so-called good old days of airline flight, by the time a General Aviation pilot was lucky enough to get an airline gig, he or she had already seen quite a bit of flying and had quite a bit of experience. In my case, that experience included the ferry flights I just described, hauling banners, dead bodies, turtle survey, forestry flying, charters and corporate gigs. I’m not complaining. I had a wonderful time in my pre-airline days and even when I frightened myself I was learning every single time I yelled “clear” and started the engine.
By the time a professional pilot, whether an airline jock or a corporate guy, got a steady flying job, he or she had been upside down a few times in an airplane, had been frightened by the weather more than once, had encountered a thunderstorm and learned why that was a very bad idea and had probably experienced an engine failure (or in my case, two).
They had pushed weather near to the point of disaster. They had pushed themselves to physical exhaustion and learned that particular limit. They had learned that legal wasn’t the same thing as safe.
Now, for the low price of only eighty or a hundred grand, you can enter various airline academies and get the tickets with none of the seasoning that simply flying a long time brings. It is totally feasible that the next airline captain and copilot you fly with on your next trip have never even experienced a full stall in an airplane. Full stalls are not required for any rating, just approaches to stalls. Ditto for spins.
Your professional crew up in the cockpit of that RJ may never have been upside down in an airplane, experienced anything other than a simulated emergency or have pushed themselves physically. I was talking to a chief pilot at a fairly big flight school the other day and she said something interesting about an interview for an open CFI position at her company.
A lady she had interviewed had all of the proper credentials and ratings. She had over 350 hours that she had accumulated going through a very expensive flight program at a prestigious airline academy. A review of her logbook showed that she had exactly 15 hours of solo time in any kind of aircraft. Think about that for a minute. Fifteen hours of solo time and she was legally prepared to teach others how to fly and make life and death decisions in the sky.
This lady did not get the job and not because she wasn’t legally qualified. She just wasn’t seasoned enough yet to teach others. The airline academies advertise that they will guarantee you an airline interview when you graduate. I’m here to tell you that an interview doesn’t equal a job offer.
Okay, so how do you get the experience needed to be a safe, professional pilot? The answer to that is simple: Any way you can. Only a very few pilots get to be airline jocks and with the current economic climate in that part of the aviation world it isn’t what it used to be.
If you really want to make flying your career, don’t limit yourself to one small part of the industry. Get flying gigs wherever and whenever you can. From fish spotting to banner towing to airborne traffic reporter, flying is flying. The only way to get experience is to go out and get it.
If you seek out those ferrying trips, banner tow jobs, and the other scud work of aviation you will be years and miles ahead of your contemporaries that think a hundred grand and nine months of monitored training is the key to flying paradise.
Fly with people more experienced than you. In the airline world I had the advantage of flying five years as an engineer on various jets before I even got a control wheel to play with. Then it was years as a copilot before I became a captain. Believe me, all that experience and learning has come in very handy more than once.
Before an airline ever showed any interest in me I had years of ferry flights, maintenance test flights, charters, canceled check runs and off-airport landings on dirt roads and open fields. Where else can you learn that cows eat upwind and sheep eat downwind?
Next time a pilot acquaintance asks you if you would mind being safety pilot while he or she did some hood work, jump at the chance. If you get a chance to go through an altitude chamber training day, take it. When offered a job as a pipeline patrol pilot in a 172 instead of the RJ copilot job you were told you’d get by your flight school take the 172 job and build experience for that upcoming jet gig.
The beauty of flying is that you never ever stop learning. From my first Ercoupe ride to last week’s 767 trip I learn something every single flight. Think of your aviation education as a trip and not a destination and I think you’ll be amazed at what you’ll learn. In a crisis it isn’t the ratings you have, it’s the background, experience and judgment you’ve gathered from experience that will see you through.
