PILOT CAREER

by Clayton Davis

Wearing the uniform at United, Delta, or American Airlines, with four stripes on the sleeve. That is the dream. Respect in air terminals 'round the world, especially in places you see in the movies, that is the reward.

Mandatory crew rest in Paris? Being able to bid a route you like, month after month, domiciled in the neighborhood where you spent your early years?

Pay your dues, you bird men and bird ladies. All pilots fly low and slow during the years they are logging time in their very first log book.

How neat that log book looks. The entries are precise and legible. Notice how hastily they are scrawled from the date when there are two-hundred hours total flying time.

That is when bird men, and ladies, can be qualified for the Commercial Pilot certificate. The public thinks "commercial" flying means someone bought a ticket and the machine made a loud noise going down the runway.

Two hundred hours and a Commercial certificate only mean the pilot is qualified to become a Flight Instructor. Many people spend their time between two hundred and seven hundred hours giving lessons, usually near where they themselves learned to fly.

How about the organized flight schools? Florida and Saint Louis have some schools known world-wide. What chance do the graduates stand of finding something that looks like the people in the school's publicity photographs? One out of ten might be close.

What about military aviators? They log about sixteen hundred hours flying time during their first tenure of service. Some of that may have been spent trying to shoot down other airplanes, or hunting hostile forces. Some may have flown heavy airplanes. That might make entry into the scheduled air carriers easier.

Unless the former military aviator has den-brothers roosting safely someplace in the major airlines, the former pilot of military airplanes joins a group of very hungry, general-aviation airmen, and ladies.

The Chief Pilot will read a thousand resumes over a ten year period. What does he look for in resumes? Total time is first. Two thousand hours of flying time, that's a nice round number. On the other hand, having ten thousand hours raises questions. Why are you changing jobs?

Having logged time in the airplanes used by your new company helps greatly. Why? Because airline insurance policies are written with that in mind. It also makes training and transition quick and easier.

What are the chances? Depends on the opportunity in front of you. If you are smart, good-looking, and rich, oh well, those three will make you a success anyplace. To begin, let's start with smart. Your native wit, and a very large measure of divine intervention help, some are convinced.

Start someplace where someone knows someone.

Follow any lead any of your friends give you. It is comforting to know the candidate has flown with someone the Chief Pilot knows and trusts. This impresses him more than well-written resumes, even when written on a word processor. Then there is dedication. What does that mean? Does the candidate begin the interview by asking how much the job pays? Aviation is an apprenticeship. It is a fact that there are fewer competent general aviation captains in a given local flying area than there are licensed medical practitioners in the same zip codes.

Does the candidate want to fly, or get rich?

Consider this -- if a person who is working on the Master of Business Administration degree sought only money, the perfect bank robbery could be planned in much less time than it takes to study for that degree. Very few pilots ever became wealthy, except through a well-placed marriage.

Pretty soon a young aviator's reputation precedes him, or her. Will he, or she, answer the beeper in the middle of the night, in a blinding rainstorm? Is this aviator consistent and credible?

The time between about seven hundred hours and two thousand flying hours a general aviation pilot will work many nights rescuing dirty boxes and canceled checks. Then, depending on charm and good looks, perhaps divine intervention, along comes the chance to haul paying passengers. Out they go, early in the morning. Back they come, late in the evening.

When do people in the business world want to travel? They must necessarily start early in the morning and return home late in the evening. Why? Because they want to be where they are going in time to put in a full day's work at the place they are visiting, that is why.

Where do they go? Where the airlines do not visit, that is where they go. Does that mean very small airports in the hills? Yes it does. The pilot's splendid, well-rounded bottom will be molded flat by the marginal furniture at some small airport not visited by the airlines. He, or she, will sit in a tiny waiting room, eating out-of-date junk food from a very small vending machine.

Be of strong physical constitution, all of you who would be aviators. Be able to digest anything you can chew. Visit the maintenance hangar. See torn apart every example of flying equipment the local economy supports. You will smell crop-dusters sitting in their bare bones. Hear legends about local flying heroes. See the richest young man in town drive up in an automobile with a name you are unable to spell.

Watch this rich young man mount a small fast airplane that can shoot down anything in the local training area. When he has refueled his small plane and is rubbing it carefully with a very clean towel, ask him how far in aviation he hopes to go. He is there. He is a legend at his own airport.

Then you will begin to think about the weather you know is waiting for you on the way back to home base. Bad weather waits until sundown, unless it is fog or evil snow. That comes early in the morning.

Now we may consider the rites of passage for young pilots. There are three hurdles. Number one is early, when the aviator reaches one hundred hours. No longer awed by flight, this pilot peeks down at the ground for the first time. What? How nice this is. Here I am, master of the sky. This is when all of the instructor's advice is forgotten. All of that good advice was just for training purposes anyway, just to get the aviator past the dreaded Flight Test. Wasn't it?

This one-hundred-hour pilot may want to circle low over some cherished landmark. His own home? Forgetting all sound advice, he allows his plane to get slower and slower. Hopefully the airplane will shudder and tremble enough to get this pilot to apply full power and level the wings.

Next comes the five-hundred-hour pilot. This one is probably doing something with the Commercial certificate, such as towing banners, or flying skydivers. Midway through the month of June, this young aviator begins to think the rules are for fools, thinks conditions can be pushed. One day this pilot finds a cross-wind beyond anything the airplane's designers had expected. Perhaps the pilot thinks dark clouds were something only to be remembered for the Written Test.

Surviving these two scares, and continuing to write time in the log book, our aviator has found employment at the first meaningful job in a long and happy career. He, or she, is receiving a printed check at regular intervals. The aviator feels secure. The logbook has over two thousand hours in it.

The route to be flown night after night is well-known. Ground support is there. The airplane is fuelled, handled, and serviced by dedicated personnel who have great respect and admiration for the pilot.

Then one dark night when he calls the dispatcher to report landing time, cargo weight, and estimated departure time, the news is gently given. An extra section must be flown. No, it will not violate duty time. No, it will not keep him out too late. Over the same boring route, our pilot must back-track and fly another dirty box.

Remember the aviator's ground handlers serviced the plane? They fuelled it and moved it around on the ground, in and out of hangars. They did everything for the machine. This airplane's fuel load at each stop was bought and paid for by the company. The pilot only had to sign for it. Alas, an extra box of cargo and the need to retrace part of the original route, this was not in the program.

Returning home, this airplane travelled almost to the end of the runway at home base, empty, with no cargo, and ran out of gas. It was being flown by one very tired and unhappy pilot.

Our brave bird man made a wonderful off-airport landing. Ground handlers expertly removed the wings and loaded the airplane upon a flatbed truck the next day. The wings were reassembled onto the airplane just the way the engineers expected them to fit.

One very embarrassed pilot told his story at a hearing in the local Federal Aviation Administration office. He is still flying today, a very wise bird man. It could as easily have been a bird lady.

The two thousand-hour rite-of-passage tests an aviator's ability to function with a heavy load of boredom and fatigue. Whatever habit patterns have been laid down in the pilot's neural pathways continue to function, despite fatigue and boredom.

Pilots must use the checklist. Develop patterns that work, even when tired enough to fall asleep and the radio has to wake you up for a frequency change, twice. If they listen to wiser and older owls, they will be able to fly with the eagles. Fly anything, anyplace, anytime, anyhow, and some wise old owl will say the word to them, someday soon.

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