TO BE A PROFESSIONAL PILOT
In 1962, I moved to Florida. Dad had rented a place on a canal in North Miami with an attached Guest room where I stayed for several months. The next door neighbors had a daughter, a lovely sexy gal who liked to wash her car in Daisy Mae cut-off jeans and loose T-shirt tops- good grief !
I signed up with Sunny South Aviation at Fort Lauderdale airport. They were located exactly where terminal four is today. My instructor, Mark Ayers, a retired navy Pilot would crank up a Cessna 150 and we would fly up to Pompano Airport, about fifteen miles north of FLL (Lauderdale) and practice flying around the pattern. After nine days and nine hours of training, on the 16th of June 1962, I flew my first solo flight.
Forty hours later, I got my Private pilots license, then a commercial followed by my multi-engine and instrument rating. For each license, you have to take a written and oral exam and then demonstrate your proficiency in the aircraft. This took a few years during which, I taught water skiing, worked as a surveyor, delivered rental beds and TV’s to small motels, flew single engine planes across the everglades and anything else I could to make a buck to pay for the training.
They say there are two flights that any pilot will never forget- his first and his last.
I remember clearly, even today, when Mark jumped out on the east end of the runway, slamming the door and waived me off. I eased the throttle forward and took to the air. I remember looking ahead and to my left but not to the right- I didn’t want to see that he wasn’t sitting in the seat next to me.
I flew every chance I got, whenever I had the money to rent an aircraft. The process is straight forwards, fly forty hours, take the written, pass a practical and a check ride and get a private pilots license. Then fly another one hundred and sixty hours and get a commercial license followed by the instrument rating and multi engine rating, each involving a tough written and practical test followed by a flight check. After that, you’re ready to make some money as a professional pilot.
So, what does it take to be a proficient and safe pilot? First let’s define the terms. It is one thing for a pilot of a Cessna 150 to fly in his home area under VFR conditions and quite another to navigate a high performance aircraft into busy airports in bad weather.
Flying, for example, into Aspen Colorado, probably one of the nations most unforgiving high altitude airports is a lot more demanding of a pilots judgment, knowledge and skills than piloting a light single engine aircraft into Pompano airport on a sunny day in Florida. We are talking here about two different animals. One is a professional aviator and the other a weekend, fly for fun, pilot. There is no comparison.
The weekend pilot with two or three hundred hours can learn, as we all have, to be a proficient, all weather pilot but, not overnight. There is absolutely nothing that can be taught or bought that will help him except to get out there and do it. Experience is not for sale and no one has learned how to “can it.”
The process of becoming a professional pilot requires a final step. As mentioned, one has to obtain a private and then commercial license followed by the instrument and multi-engine ratings and then, finally, after logging 1200 hours, the ATP, Airline Transport License. Each requires considerable time and effort, practical and written tests have to be passed, training aircraft located and paid for and all this cannot be done overnight.
For a person to spend the time and effort to reach the point where he might be considered for a co-pilots position with a charter operator or an airline, that person has likely determined to pursue a goal of becoming a professional pilot. Once there he can begin learning what the job is really all about.
Let’s discuss what it’s not about. Flying at a professional level, is seventy percent judgment and thirty stick and rudder skills. Both the weekend pilot and the professional aviator may have the same motor skills to maneuver the aircraft but the overwhelming requirement for flying in all conditions into high density complex airspace is judgment.
Judgment is a derivative of the pilots accumulated aviation knowledge meaning his professional education, flight experience and the ability to process this against the particulars of any given situation to make a correct decision. The pilot, who after thirty or forty years of flying without incident, accident or hangar stories, is a pilot who has demonstrated a high degree of good judgment.
Safe flying, which is the end- game of all flying, begins well before any flight leaves the ground. Safe pilots don’t have financial, marital, alcohol, health or drug problems. Safe pilots are not born, they are made. After one has flown a thousand or more 200’ &1/2 mile approaches into and out of high density airports and flown ten to fifteen thousand hours with another pilot who has even greater experience, the first officer is ready to assume
command.
He is, by this time, confident of his ability and knows his aircraft. He can likely draw out the ships systems and label the various filters, pumps motors, electrical buses and can tell you the pressures, quantities, airspeeds, weights and the assorted multitude of numbers that make up the aircraft systems, performance and limitations. He can see in his mind the approach paths, taxi ways and parking aprons of dozens of airports worldwide. He has flown many times the complex approaches and departures into and from these airports and understands very well the effects of weather along his routes. He knows how to read forecasts and how to evaluate them against the performance of the aircraft and his own skills.
There is no amount of classroom education that can instill this level of judgment in the novice pilot. Only by spending ten or fifteen years flying eighty hours a month can one develop the requisite judgment ( air sense) and knowledge to safely fly in all-weather high density conditions.
After a year or so he had his first license issued by the CAA, the Civil Aviation Authority and the predecessor to today’s FAA. The owner of the circus had Dad flying passengers to Atlantic City and, at times, returning at night, flying low, in light snow following the Black Horse Pike. One dark and stormy night some drunk left a bottle in the cockpit that lodged under the rudder pedal, Dad had to climb from the back to the front cockpit to get it free. He told this story to one of his fellow flying buddies when I was a kid, so I guess it was one of those things that stayed in his memory. (Wings field, circa 1930, above)
On weekends in those days many people from Philadelphia would drive to the local airports to watch the pilots and their aircraft - flying in the thirties was still new enough to be of great interest. There was some Vine street drunk, who would show up every weekend to jump from Dad’s aircraft with a pair of bat like wings and soar around for a while before opening his parachute. This was an immense crowd pleaser.
