The Romantic in Me Still Wants to be a Pilot
I remember the first time I was in an airplane. I was too young to still remember the destination, but I remember buckling an unwieldy metal seatbelt in a window seat on the left side of the aisle. My mother was next to me. Dad and my sister were behind us. She had a window seat directly behind mine. I was far away enough from the wing to have a clear view outside. I had never been in a vehicle so large, and when it taxid away from the boarding gate I could feel the unfamiliar thrum of jet engines vibrating through the floor, my seat, and even the air in the cabin. There was a slight thrill of helplessness as I watched the concrete coast by beneath us at the whim of a pilot many yards away who I might never see. It was, at that point, the most exciting moment of my life. Even at the age of eleven or twelve, I had played many hours with the Flight Simulator game on our computer at home (in those days it ran in DOS, not Windows). So I recognized the fat white parallel lines on the black tarmac as the plane rolled briefly to a stop. We were at the beginning of the runway. No computer game could have prepared me for what came next.
The engines, which had been loud already, roared to full strength and I could hear nothing else. I was pressed into my seatback as I watched the white lines, the grass, the lights and parked vehicles along the runways streak past. Then, like a giant had become curious of our winged metal tube, the massive vehicle was plucked off the ground. At this point the finality of what we had done, what we had committed to, struck me. Our lives depended on the winds, the air pressure, and the trust that the engines would continue to work. One bad air pocket this early in the flight and it would all be over. There was so much around us we had committed to depend upon just to keep us alive for the next two hours, and none of it was under anybody’s control. My wonder at the phenomenon of flight was accompanied by a worried twist in my stomach for how fragile our situation was!
The airport continued to fall away beneath us. People became specks. Parking lots looked like shelves of micro-machines. Eventually the roads of Chicago became a concrete spiderweb slapped on the surface of the globe. As the details of the ground became less defined, I noticed a flat ceiling of cumulus clouds stretching to the horizon like an inverted sea. “Are we going through that?” I asked Mom. Her answer was affirmative. I braced myself for another plunge beyond the unknown. My eyes remained glued to the window.
But the fear was unnecessary. The jet sliced unhindered into the clouds like they were so much water vapor. After a few moments of opaque fog, we burst through the gray sky into a bright world above the clouds so huge and alien it remains one of my most vivid memories. Uninterrupted sunlight shone down on pure white mountains made of air. The overcast sky below was just the subterranean drear beneath this expansive world of bright light and pure air that only certain birds once knew. I saw the gleam of another jet, far away, sliding past us in the opposite direction. It pierced one of the fluffy towers and emerged from the other side before penetrating the cloudy floor. The scale of it all was magnificent.
Up here nothing mattered, except the awe of creation. Not even gravity could restrict your movement up here. Up, down, left, right, the possibilities were endless if you could fly. Where you could go and what you could see was limited not by fences, roads or geography, but only by your level of fuel and patience.
My infatuation with air travel was solidified by that experience. I’ve gone on to do other things, but the visceral fascination I have with flight never seems to go away. And sometimes an article or blog shows up that reactivates that often-buried part of my psyche.
The very first job on Forbes.com’s “Surprising Six Figure Jobs” was a commercial pilot. And not necessarily for airlines. Small aircraft, flying cargo and passengers around. Just like one of my favorite heroes.
High pay means it’s in high demand or low supply. And that’s an encouraging factor for someone who fantasizes from time to time about going into that line of work.
And that’s something I’m still foggy on. The road to a commercial pilot’s certification is a long and nuanced one. Just look at the FAA code for qualifications. Though I have to admit, with the unfettered influx of spanish-speaking “unskilled” workers in this country, a guy like me needs to be set apart in a field that requires developed skills and proficiency in English. Why stick to lines of work where the competition is most numerous?
It definitely beats the heck out of law school. Something that gets me off the surface of the planet once in a while would be a godsend. The cool part about getting pilot’s credentials is that it takes time more than anything, and the time spent accumulating hours in an aircraft, I would consider purely recreational. It would be like logging the time you spent on your hobby and using that to get a license to do it professionally. (Even though you all know how I feel about government licenses. Why should I beg for permission from some bureaucrat to go looking for work?) Lucky me there’s a flyers club and municipal airport nearby.
Money aside, the romantic in me adores the freedom there is in flight. Sure, there are bureaucratic hoops, there are protocols, regulations, preflight checks and a great deal of radio contact to maintain. You can’t just hop in a plane and take off like you can in a car, unless you want to freak out the air traffic controller, whose job is stressful enough already, thank you. Takeoff and landing are tightly controlled situations and with good reason. But while in the air, all that seems very very small.
