How more frustrating can it gets?
Moderators: sky's the limit, sepia, Sulako, lilfssister, North Shore, I WAS Birddog
How more frustrating can it gets?
What can be more frustrating than looking at your friends who finished flight school at the same time than you and decided to go on the "dark side of the force" and work unpaid for a couple of months, and this guy's 1800 hours, King Air captain and you, who decided to stay on the right side, never work unpaid, still hangs out on fire patrols on 182's, only reaching 400 TT... Gosh temptation can become hard... Must resist! What kind of world do we live in.....
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ScudRunner
- Rank 11
- Posts: 3239
- Joined: Tue Jun 08, 2004 11:58 am
gig...Man you have to let that flight school competitive attitude go to the way side.
Planes are planes, and will always be there. Hours are nice, but enjoying life is Key….It’s all about the journey – not to a nice piece of heavy iron (thought that’s part of it), but life in general. Make the most of it and enjoy the ride.
Cheers.
Planes are planes, and will always be there. Hours are nice, but enjoying life is Key….It’s all about the journey – not to a nice piece of heavy iron (thought that’s part of it), but life in general. Make the most of it and enjoy the ride.
Cheers.
The feet you step on today might be attached to the ass you're kissing tomorrow.
Chase lifestyle not metal.
Chase lifestyle not metal.
-
Check Pilot
- Rank 6
- Posts: 426
- Joined: Mon Feb 16, 2004 4:26 am
Aviation isn't fair, is it?
There seems to be some newcomers to the site.
I'd like to post this thing again for you nice shiny toothed youngsters.
Don't get discouraged. If you stick it out have a look at what I
went through in my 35 years of flying.
If you've got the guts, you'll get there one day too. I know you already have the brains.
Be prepared, it's a long read.
_________________________________________________
How to become a pilot the easy way:
At first a lot of new aspiring pilots, like most normal folk, look to take the path to the top that has least resistance. It should just be a simple matter of getting that Licence and the time.
Simple, isn’t it?
After all, flying is fun.
BUT - -
Just like every other technical profession, including aviation, that point of view does not cut it. (It turns out that it ain’t fun after all sometimes). At first, it seems like a cruel lesson in misjudgment that one seems to have made, but it’s one that must be learned as quickly as possible. That’s because aviation is a bit different. Folks get into aviation because of passion.
That Passion causes all kinds of grief for everyone.
Just like every other technical profession, aviation demands that you “apprentice” before you get that final “respect” as a Pilot-In – Command. Unfortunately, with aviation, there is no recognized technical school, University or “Bible College” course that you can take to get you on track like there is for plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, sheet metal workers, welders or Doctors.
Aviators are on their own. When you start making money at aviation you are nothing but a glorified taxi driver. - - - Cruel, isn’t it.
Life is not fair as an aviator and you have to get over that just about as fast as you can.
Can you make a living at it though?
Especially in aviation.-
I’ll say again, - it’s best to get over that part as soon as possible. Accept it and get on with things.
The real truth is that it takes a depth of experience to really succeed and feel totally comfortable with aircraft operations. Trying to short circuit the process will lead you to trouble, sometimes years later down the road.
I understand the desire to start fuselage hugging as soon as possible. Don’t get me wrong though. It’s not wrong to do that. Most aspiring new pilots must do it or they wouldn’t be there in the first place, since that really is part of a pilot's psyche.
It gets really frustrating though and here’s why:
After that nice multi-engine Commercial Licence is safely in your pocket, the nice shiny old twin on the ramp starts to look a bit small after a couple of veeeery costly trips down south with the buddies building time.
Expensive too.
The frustration sets in when there are no employers out there that want you with that nice newly printed commercial, multi-engine Licence in your pocket. Nobody can help with a prospect of an employer. Government employment people take your information but inform you that there are no jobs listed anywhere in the country.
None.
Except some outfit in the Middle East looking for B763 pilots – (totally out of the question). --You know that can’t be right though. One guy you know that got his Licence just about a year ago just got a super job as co-pilot on an IFR Navajo operation. But, sure enough, the more you look, nobody is advertising for pilots. That is a major let down. Resumes and telephone calls go nowhere, so the next step seems to be an Instrument Rating to make things a bit more “saleable”.
Another two thousand bucks later you get one. Now your Mom is really starting to wonder about her precious son’s chosen career path.
Finally, a job on the dock in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, shows up on an obscure web site, with a possibility of a flying “opportunity” the next fall. Better than nothing. Sure enough, you get hired to load freight, fuel, tourists, beer, food, cottage owners and fishermen.
Life is good. You spend another thousand bucks and get a “float” rating on a couple of days off.
The Chief Pilot does your last hour and signs your recommend form. You get your Licence a week later. Obviously, you are now a float “Ace” since the Chief Pilot signed you off. You must have an “in” with the Company now.
Your girlfriend and her Mom from Winnipeg show up for a nice visit too, but have to go after three days, leaving behind your nice (wrinkled) white shirt with the now tarnished epaulettes. Just before she goes, she tells you she has a new job 2500 miles west from her home and will now be in Calgary, but doesn’t know a new address or phone number yet….
You spend the long cooold winter loading freight at the skiplane Base and then get moved to the AIRPORT in March. Finally there is something on wheels that you can relate to as a pilot, and that has some instruments to go “IFR” with and the guys that fly them. You get to talk, mostly briefly, with these old pilots in the Company lounge about the exciting trips to places like Cree Lake, Stony Rapids and Uranium City. Some of them even have a GPS that functions most of the time. They do have lots of experience in the last couple of years that’s worth listening to and look more than 23 years old to you. They do seem to argue with each other though. One night they even invite you to the bar for a few “Brown Pops”. You notice they seem to be able to down a beer at a frightening rate that night and don’t seem to talk to anyone but one on one with each other. One 35-year-old pilot talks to you a lot though, and then drops you off at home later.
At this point things go one of two ways.
You have made it with the Chief Pilot or you haven’t.
*************************************************************************************************************
You stay for a while or you go on to something else, because Mom, Dad, the Bank or somebody else needs some return on their “investment”.
*************************************************************************************************************
Pilots naturally get frustrated when they perceive others "using" the system to get ahead and wind up getting that nice B1900 job in the right seat when they’re sitting in the right hand seat of a Navajo for 200 hours and two months down the road. That new 1900 person can now (for a few months, at least) carry around that good old perceived ego on the shoulder and let other, former, co-workers know that "he's got it together”, and “how great things are."
All I can say to that is "wow".
I’ve noticed, however, that just about every new guy starts telling me that it ends pretty quickly when the routine starts to set in.
Pretty soon, the only thing that is routine is the boredom of being a sked pilot in a “simple” aeroplane. That seemingly complex piece of mysterious engineering magnificence is no longer a rewarding experience to fly but becomes only a means to getting those miles or hours to pay the bills at home with the new wife. Not only that, but something always seems busted on the damn thing anyway. The owners won’t fix it because “it’s too expensive right now”, and “you probably don’t need it anyway today”. MEL’s always seem to make the trip go ahead anyway.
So what’s nexxt?
Away we go again, looking for that bigger and better, perfect fuselage that always works right, with that new and “better” company, and the challenges of a newer, nicer and “better” aeroplane.
What a beautiful fuselage sitting at the loading bridge in front of the terminal building.
Don’t get me wrong though,
Pilots are always looking for a challenge or they would have never made it as a pilot in the first place. Maybe that’s one of the reasons so many pilots get new wives so often. I can speak from experience. I was no different than anyone else out there. I’m married again, though.
Those of you new to the business, always tell me that you learned a lot from that senior, grizzled old guy with the bad attitude, in the left seat. A year later that same, used to be, new guy, is the senior, grizzled old guy with the bad attitude in the left seat.
That’s now you….
How much did you, the new guy, really learn during that first tour of duty in the right seat? How much of that command decision making REALLY got learned properly?
In my opinion, not much - I know though. I’ve seen it all before.
Particularly with simulators.
New guys ALWAYS tell me it’s better, from the right seat, to observe the senior pilots making the decisions, since for some reason, unknownst to me, they think they’ve now gained that power of the almighty from those observations. A simulator almost always proves the pilot to be human.
Sure guys learn from others by watching, observing, doing and sometimes getting yelled at too. That’s how life, even outside aviation, is, anyway. We learn from experience and interaction with other people.
How much really got absorbed as a potential Commander however?
Aircraft, regardless of size still conform to the laws of physics. Little ones or big ones. What does change with size are the rules.
If anyone hasn't noticed, you can go out by yourself and get killed in a little aeroplane and only the local media makes much mention of it. Kill 9 folks and it's still just air taxi. Mere news on page 1 or 2 of the local major newspaper and a word or two on the suppertime local TV news. Commuter however, with up to 19 on board, will get national attention and maybe a public inquiry headed up by some famous notary(ity) public lawyer. Crash an airliner and the whole world knows right away.
Anyone care to be the centre of that kind of attention?
From a physics point of view, what is the difference that size makes? - - None!
So let’s get down to brass tacks here.
What DOES make a difference though, and what does make Operators pay attention to those seemingly stupid little things like your depth of experience and command decision-making is really two things. Media coverage and insurance. Owners and/or Operators don’t want either one of those two going up. - Particularly when someone smashes up one of their planes. And both of those will go up if you crash their aeroplane. Those two facts will either make it or break it for you as a pilot. You have to prove you have the ability to avoid both of those issues or you are out of the picture.
You satisfy both and you have a job.
By the time you sit in the left seat you know that, not by knowledge, but now it’s instinctive. I hope it’s part of your life by the time you get in that Command seat.
That’s why operators seem so damn picky when they are looking for pilots to hire.
It ain’t you.
It’s those two things that qualify you or not. Will you keep a low profile with the media and insurance company or not? Is there a chance you will crash the plane? If you are experienced and/or qualified and show you have slim, to no, chance of creating a media or insurance “preventable event” you get the job. If you can’t prove that to the operator - forget it.
That’s where the experience and command time is so VERY important. Most good operators can sense it somehow. Trying to BS an operator is kind of like tricking a TC Inspector into flying a powered parachute. It just ain’t gonna happen. (Now, before you get me wrong, some poor TC buggers do get ORDERED to go out and do that, but not without protests. They usually request transfers to a different branch right away after that however). (If they don’t, their peers razz them mercilessly).
If, for some reason, you make a mistake with a big aeroplane later in life and take out 100 people with you, and you had not gone through the proper “apprenticeship” period making decisions the right way in the past, you can guarantee yourself a place in(famous) history, unless you have an extremely lucky angel sitting on your shoulder.
Crash a big aeroplane and the uneducated public will know every single detail of your life, right down to whether or not your mother breast-fed you when you were young. RIGHT AWAY AND RIGHT NOW. Within minutes or hours, with no holds barred. You, if you live, will get media surrounding you just like gold diggers circling a new millionaire. Even the Company, wife and lawyer won’t keep them off “your story”.
What are you going to say? My mother died in childbirth? My upbringing was abnormal? My father beat me all the time? My wife is a lesbian? What? How about “I was just a normal kid”? Just what can you say?
Most of us know about the seemingly “stupid” mistakes that other guys have made. They get publicized very widely in our circle of folks. Our peers make the most of the tiniest excruciating miniscule of mistakes.
Every active Canadian pilot gets the Aviation Safety Letter with the good old A.I.P. amendment
and I’ll bet when some folks read about the “accident of the month”, are sure that the command decision that the poor bugger made and then got written about, would never happen to them. I’ll just bet that most of those that did make the “wrong” decision read the Letter too. Did they make those “mistakes” on purpose? 99.99999% of the time, - no. (There have been those that just had to get even though. That accounts for the .000001% that did do it on purpose. For those, I have no cure or answer. They’re just nuts).
I also know that many of us have heard the A.T.C. tapes and have seen the C.V.R. stuff from the major crashes. Just remember that you might be a voice on one of those some day. Even “little” aeroplanes like BE-100’s might have them. Bigger stuff even records the mistakes you make with the aeroplane while you handle it by way of the FDR when you make a big mistake. Even more so are the aeroplanes that “tattle” on you when you are not even airborne yet – the engine manufacturer knows you started without he APU!!! - i.e. “semi” hot start – via the ACARS. The whole world knows you went off the Company SOP’s. The Chief Pilot wants to talk to you just as soon as you get back to home base.
All of this dissertation is really meant to say to you young, new freshly scrubbed faces in aviation - - Don’t try to short circuit the command time on the basic machines. You really do need it, even if right now, you see that shiny new fuselage sitting there inviting you to go along and get those “invaluable and “priceless hours”.
Later on you won’t regret getting those instructor or bush times and you will discover the really and truly priceless days that I still think were the best time of my life. I learned about Commanding an aircraft from those days. True Command!
Experience as a Pilot-in-Command on your own, leads to maturity that is NOT obtainable any other way. There is just no simple way of doing it while you become a professional in the aviation business of driving that aluminum tube around the sky. It takes time. Time, in terms of calendars, not only hours in the air. I wish there was another way. I wish that I could give all of you the benefit of experience and knowledge by osmosis somehow. Right now, there isn’t a way to do that. Until evolution changes the way we all learn, it ain’t gonna change.
It’s up to you to get the time. On your own! I think most of you can do that.
Please don’t be lured by the “fast track”. You really must, on your own, get that command time on your own, and go the “old” way to really be able to happily retire (I know, that’s the last thing on your mind right now, but) without becoming a part of world wide (infamous) aviation history.
And finally:
Everything in the company manual - policy, warnings, instructions, the works - can be summed up to read, ‘Captain it’s your baby.’
Signed:
An old Transport Canada pilot.
I'd like to post this thing again for you nice shiny toothed youngsters.
Don't get discouraged. If you stick it out have a look at what I
went through in my 35 years of flying.
If you've got the guts, you'll get there one day too. I know you already have the brains.
Be prepared, it's a long read.
_________________________________________________
How to become a pilot the easy way:
At first a lot of new aspiring pilots, like most normal folk, look to take the path to the top that has least resistance. It should just be a simple matter of getting that Licence and the time.
Simple, isn’t it?
After all, flying is fun.
BUT - -
Just like every other technical profession, including aviation, that point of view does not cut it. (It turns out that it ain’t fun after all sometimes). At first, it seems like a cruel lesson in misjudgment that one seems to have made, but it’s one that must be learned as quickly as possible. That’s because aviation is a bit different. Folks get into aviation because of passion.
That Passion causes all kinds of grief for everyone.
Just like every other technical profession, aviation demands that you “apprentice” before you get that final “respect” as a Pilot-In – Command. Unfortunately, with aviation, there is no recognized technical school, University or “Bible College” course that you can take to get you on track like there is for plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, sheet metal workers, welders or Doctors.
Aviators are on their own. When you start making money at aviation you are nothing but a glorified taxi driver. - - - Cruel, isn’t it.
Life is not fair as an aviator and you have to get over that just about as fast as you can.
Can you make a living at it though?
Especially in aviation.-
I’ll say again, - it’s best to get over that part as soon as possible. Accept it and get on with things.
The real truth is that it takes a depth of experience to really succeed and feel totally comfortable with aircraft operations. Trying to short circuit the process will lead you to trouble, sometimes years later down the road.
I understand the desire to start fuselage hugging as soon as possible. Don’t get me wrong though. It’s not wrong to do that. Most aspiring new pilots must do it or they wouldn’t be there in the first place, since that really is part of a pilot's psyche.
It gets really frustrating though and here’s why:
After that nice multi-engine Commercial Licence is safely in your pocket, the nice shiny old twin on the ramp starts to look a bit small after a couple of veeeery costly trips down south with the buddies building time.
Expensive too.
The frustration sets in when there are no employers out there that want you with that nice newly printed commercial, multi-engine Licence in your pocket. Nobody can help with a prospect of an employer. Government employment people take your information but inform you that there are no jobs listed anywhere in the country.
None.
Except some outfit in the Middle East looking for B763 pilots – (totally out of the question). --You know that can’t be right though. One guy you know that got his Licence just about a year ago just got a super job as co-pilot on an IFR Navajo operation. But, sure enough, the more you look, nobody is advertising for pilots. That is a major let down. Resumes and telephone calls go nowhere, so the next step seems to be an Instrument Rating to make things a bit more “saleable”.
Another two thousand bucks later you get one. Now your Mom is really starting to wonder about her precious son’s chosen career path.
Finally, a job on the dock in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, shows up on an obscure web site, with a possibility of a flying “opportunity” the next fall. Better than nothing. Sure enough, you get hired to load freight, fuel, tourists, beer, food, cottage owners and fishermen.
Life is good. You spend another thousand bucks and get a “float” rating on a couple of days off.
The Chief Pilot does your last hour and signs your recommend form. You get your Licence a week later. Obviously, you are now a float “Ace” since the Chief Pilot signed you off. You must have an “in” with the Company now.
Your girlfriend and her Mom from Winnipeg show up for a nice visit too, but have to go after three days, leaving behind your nice (wrinkled) white shirt with the now tarnished epaulettes. Just before she goes, she tells you she has a new job 2500 miles west from her home and will now be in Calgary, but doesn’t know a new address or phone number yet….
You spend the long cooold winter loading freight at the skiplane Base and then get moved to the AIRPORT in March. Finally there is something on wheels that you can relate to as a pilot, and that has some instruments to go “IFR” with and the guys that fly them. You get to talk, mostly briefly, with these old pilots in the Company lounge about the exciting trips to places like Cree Lake, Stony Rapids and Uranium City. Some of them even have a GPS that functions most of the time. They do have lots of experience in the last couple of years that’s worth listening to and look more than 23 years old to you. They do seem to argue with each other though. One night they even invite you to the bar for a few “Brown Pops”. You notice they seem to be able to down a beer at a frightening rate that night and don’t seem to talk to anyone but one on one with each other. One 35-year-old pilot talks to you a lot though, and then drops you off at home later.
At this point things go one of two ways.
You have made it with the Chief Pilot or you haven’t.
*************************************************************************************************************
You stay for a while or you go on to something else, because Mom, Dad, the Bank or somebody else needs some return on their “investment”.
*************************************************************************************************************
Pilots naturally get frustrated when they perceive others "using" the system to get ahead and wind up getting that nice B1900 job in the right seat when they’re sitting in the right hand seat of a Navajo for 200 hours and two months down the road. That new 1900 person can now (for a few months, at least) carry around that good old perceived ego on the shoulder and let other, former, co-workers know that "he's got it together”, and “how great things are."
All I can say to that is "wow".
I’ve noticed, however, that just about every new guy starts telling me that it ends pretty quickly when the routine starts to set in.
Pretty soon, the only thing that is routine is the boredom of being a sked pilot in a “simple” aeroplane. That seemingly complex piece of mysterious engineering magnificence is no longer a rewarding experience to fly but becomes only a means to getting those miles or hours to pay the bills at home with the new wife. Not only that, but something always seems busted on the damn thing anyway. The owners won’t fix it because “it’s too expensive right now”, and “you probably don’t need it anyway today”. MEL’s always seem to make the trip go ahead anyway.
So what’s nexxt?
Away we go again, looking for that bigger and better, perfect fuselage that always works right, with that new and “better” company, and the challenges of a newer, nicer and “better” aeroplane.
What a beautiful fuselage sitting at the loading bridge in front of the terminal building.
Don’t get me wrong though,
Pilots are always looking for a challenge or they would have never made it as a pilot in the first place. Maybe that’s one of the reasons so many pilots get new wives so often. I can speak from experience. I was no different than anyone else out there. I’m married again, though.
Those of you new to the business, always tell me that you learned a lot from that senior, grizzled old guy with the bad attitude, in the left seat. A year later that same, used to be, new guy, is the senior, grizzled old guy with the bad attitude in the left seat.
That’s now you….
How much did you, the new guy, really learn during that first tour of duty in the right seat? How much of that command decision making REALLY got learned properly?
In my opinion, not much - I know though. I’ve seen it all before.
Particularly with simulators.
New guys ALWAYS tell me it’s better, from the right seat, to observe the senior pilots making the decisions, since for some reason, unknownst to me, they think they’ve now gained that power of the almighty from those observations. A simulator almost always proves the pilot to be human.
Sure guys learn from others by watching, observing, doing and sometimes getting yelled at too. That’s how life, even outside aviation, is, anyway. We learn from experience and interaction with other people.
How much really got absorbed as a potential Commander however?
Aircraft, regardless of size still conform to the laws of physics. Little ones or big ones. What does change with size are the rules.
If anyone hasn't noticed, you can go out by yourself and get killed in a little aeroplane and only the local media makes much mention of it. Kill 9 folks and it's still just air taxi. Mere news on page 1 or 2 of the local major newspaper and a word or two on the suppertime local TV news. Commuter however, with up to 19 on board, will get national attention and maybe a public inquiry headed up by some famous notary(ity) public lawyer. Crash an airliner and the whole world knows right away.
Anyone care to be the centre of that kind of attention?
From a physics point of view, what is the difference that size makes? - - None!
So let’s get down to brass tacks here.
What DOES make a difference though, and what does make Operators pay attention to those seemingly stupid little things like your depth of experience and command decision-making is really two things. Media coverage and insurance. Owners and/or Operators don’t want either one of those two going up. - Particularly when someone smashes up one of their planes. And both of those will go up if you crash their aeroplane. Those two facts will either make it or break it for you as a pilot. You have to prove you have the ability to avoid both of those issues or you are out of the picture.
You satisfy both and you have a job.
By the time you sit in the left seat you know that, not by knowledge, but now it’s instinctive. I hope it’s part of your life by the time you get in that Command seat.
That’s why operators seem so damn picky when they are looking for pilots to hire.
It ain’t you.
It’s those two things that qualify you or not. Will you keep a low profile with the media and insurance company or not? Is there a chance you will crash the plane? If you are experienced and/or qualified and show you have slim, to no, chance of creating a media or insurance “preventable event” you get the job. If you can’t prove that to the operator - forget it.
That’s where the experience and command time is so VERY important. Most good operators can sense it somehow. Trying to BS an operator is kind of like tricking a TC Inspector into flying a powered parachute. It just ain’t gonna happen. (Now, before you get me wrong, some poor TC buggers do get ORDERED to go out and do that, but not without protests. They usually request transfers to a different branch right away after that however). (If they don’t, their peers razz them mercilessly).
If, for some reason, you make a mistake with a big aeroplane later in life and take out 100 people with you, and you had not gone through the proper “apprenticeship” period making decisions the right way in the past, you can guarantee yourself a place in(famous) history, unless you have an extremely lucky angel sitting on your shoulder.
Crash a big aeroplane and the uneducated public will know every single detail of your life, right down to whether or not your mother breast-fed you when you were young. RIGHT AWAY AND RIGHT NOW. Within minutes or hours, with no holds barred. You, if you live, will get media surrounding you just like gold diggers circling a new millionaire. Even the Company, wife and lawyer won’t keep them off “your story”.
What are you going to say? My mother died in childbirth? My upbringing was abnormal? My father beat me all the time? My wife is a lesbian? What? How about “I was just a normal kid”? Just what can you say?
Most of us know about the seemingly “stupid” mistakes that other guys have made. They get publicized very widely in our circle of folks. Our peers make the most of the tiniest excruciating miniscule of mistakes.
Every active Canadian pilot gets the Aviation Safety Letter with the good old A.I.P. amendment
and I’ll bet when some folks read about the “accident of the month”, are sure that the command decision that the poor bugger made and then got written about, would never happen to them. I’ll just bet that most of those that did make the “wrong” decision read the Letter too. Did they make those “mistakes” on purpose? 99.99999% of the time, - no. (There have been those that just had to get even though. That accounts for the .000001% that did do it on purpose. For those, I have no cure or answer. They’re just nuts).
I also know that many of us have heard the A.T.C. tapes and have seen the C.V.R. stuff from the major crashes. Just remember that you might be a voice on one of those some day. Even “little” aeroplanes like BE-100’s might have them. Bigger stuff even records the mistakes you make with the aeroplane while you handle it by way of the FDR when you make a big mistake. Even more so are the aeroplanes that “tattle” on you when you are not even airborne yet – the engine manufacturer knows you started without he APU!!! - i.e. “semi” hot start – via the ACARS. The whole world knows you went off the Company SOP’s. The Chief Pilot wants to talk to you just as soon as you get back to home base.
All of this dissertation is really meant to say to you young, new freshly scrubbed faces in aviation - - Don’t try to short circuit the command time on the basic machines. You really do need it, even if right now, you see that shiny new fuselage sitting there inviting you to go along and get those “invaluable and “priceless hours”.
Later on you won’t regret getting those instructor or bush times and you will discover the really and truly priceless days that I still think were the best time of my life. I learned about Commanding an aircraft from those days. True Command!
Experience as a Pilot-in-Command on your own, leads to maturity that is NOT obtainable any other way. There is just no simple way of doing it while you become a professional in the aviation business of driving that aluminum tube around the sky. It takes time. Time, in terms of calendars, not only hours in the air. I wish there was another way. I wish that I could give all of you the benefit of experience and knowledge by osmosis somehow. Right now, there isn’t a way to do that. Until evolution changes the way we all learn, it ain’t gonna change.
It’s up to you to get the time. On your own! I think most of you can do that.
Please don’t be lured by the “fast track”. You really must, on your own, get that command time on your own, and go the “old” way to really be able to happily retire (I know, that’s the last thing on your mind right now, but) without becoming a part of world wide (infamous) aviation history.
And finally:
Everything in the company manual - policy, warnings, instructions, the works - can be summed up to read, ‘Captain it’s your baby.’
Signed:
An old Transport Canada pilot.
Awesome read!!! Again, it's the journey, not the destination. And more importantly what you learn along the way, and how you apply it to your life and career. Even the bleakest of times offer the truest lessons in coping, and avoiding more bleak times in the future. Well Put
-
Snagmaster E
- Rank 5
- Posts: 306
- Joined: Sun Feb 29, 2004 7:45 am
I have one friend who was instructing for a while while some of our friends went on to 1900's and such. Then he went on a metro and just recently on a Dash 8, and passed them all. He was never bitter about it. I'm not there yet and want to get there soon, but I hold no resentment towards my friends who are further along.
Bitterness leads to anger.
Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads...... well you know.
Bitterness leads to anger.
Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads...... well you know.
Money, wish I had it...
-
Canus Chinookus
- Rank 7
- Posts: 707
- Joined: Thu Oct 21, 2004 6:30 pm
Awesome read Check pilot!!!!
To everyone out there, it's the journey there that is the most fun and memorable. This is probably where you are gonna make those really good friends that you'll keep in touch with for the rest of your life. These people are the ones that you'll have endless stories of how you toughed it out....whether it be on the ramp, cropdusting in the prairies...sweating your balls off, flying those americains into those amazing fishing spots and getting tipped 100 large for the awesome ride/fishing... or as a instructor and seeing the joy of a new pilot when they first solo. You'll hopefully all end up to where you want to be later on and you can say i remember you...we worked together on the dock in.......
It is a lot harder for the people that are starting their career that are older as they want the pay and job security/remain married.... however it IS POSSIBLE as i have several friends that have made it work ....only getting in to avation in their 30's.
However.......it is a lot easier if you're into flying because of the PASSION. If you're in the industry for the money (sometimes hard to find!!!) or because you hear of the great work schedule an airline pilot has, you may end up being a very bitter person by the time you get to "your" end of the road" because of all the BS you had to endure along the way.
Just my two cents.....
To everyone out there, it's the journey there that is the most fun and memorable. This is probably where you are gonna make those really good friends that you'll keep in touch with for the rest of your life. These people are the ones that you'll have endless stories of how you toughed it out....whether it be on the ramp, cropdusting in the prairies...sweating your balls off, flying those americains into those amazing fishing spots and getting tipped 100 large for the awesome ride/fishing... or as a instructor and seeing the joy of a new pilot when they first solo. You'll hopefully all end up to where you want to be later on and you can say i remember you...we worked together on the dock in.......
It is a lot harder for the people that are starting their career that are older as they want the pay and job security/remain married.... however it IS POSSIBLE as i have several friends that have made it work ....only getting in to avation in their 30's.
However.......it is a lot easier if you're into flying because of the PASSION. If you're in the industry for the money (sometimes hard to find!!!) or because you hear of the great work schedule an airline pilot has, you may end up being a very bitter person by the time you get to "your" end of the road" because of all the BS you had to endure along the way.
Just my two cents.....
....crank and bank baby....
check pilot, exellent read, I ususally don't read the posts that are that long but that one really caught my eye. very well done.
I agree with KAG, get rid of the resentment attitude, if you rush your career you will not have any real memories to tell to your kids or grandkids when you are older cause you passed by on some great things just to get to fly a jet.
I know guys that are 25 saying that they want to be at the airlines NOW. and they send resumes all the time to them, well whats the hurry. you'll get there and be happy for a month and then start to think about when you were bombing around in the bad weather flying into those crappy northern strips, etc.
there is no rush, enjoy your career day by day, its the only way to go.
and who cares where your friends are at, be happy for them not jealous..
I agree with KAG, get rid of the resentment attitude, if you rush your career you will not have any real memories to tell to your kids or grandkids when you are older cause you passed by on some great things just to get to fly a jet.
I know guys that are 25 saying that they want to be at the airlines NOW. and they send resumes all the time to them, well whats the hurry. you'll get there and be happy for a month and then start to think about when you were bombing around in the bad weather flying into those crappy northern strips, etc.
there is no rush, enjoy your career day by day, its the only way to go.
and who cares where your friends are at, be happy for them not jealous..
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Vickers vanguard
- Rank 7
- Posts: 533
- Joined: Mon Aug 23, 2004 2:04 pm
- Location: YUL
