In 1998 a friend of mine came to me and asked if I wanted to learn how to fly… He knew I always wanted to be a pilot. He needed the hours instructing and I had the desire to learn. I thought maybe I can get my pilot license and just fly north to go snow skiing instead of driving the four hours… Little did I know I would make a career out of it.
He said if I rent the plane he would teach me for free. I’m getting free instruction (usually about $30/hr maybe more these days) with my friend and he’s building his flight time to move on to the next level.
When you start your pilot career you are always trying to build time. When you first start out you trying to build solo time, then instrument time, then multi-time etc… Let me explain that.
So he’s getting to build his experience by teaching me how to fly and we are both saving money in the process. Seems like a win-win for us both! We met up and went to the local airport to start building flight time. Just ten short hours of flight instruction over the course of a few weeks and I was hooked! I always knew I wanted to fly but never really knew how to get started. I didn’t realize it was this easy… just drive on down to the local airport and find a flight school. A quick internet search will bring up the closest one to you.
They are located at almost every small airport imaginable… The schools are always willing to help out because they want to sell you the time to keep their business profitable, but every experienced instructor I’ve met truly has the desire and passion to help. The ones who have been there seem to have that natural desire to help people. Most of the guys there are building flight time to move on to the next step. Whichever that is for them. Flying for a private owner, flying for a charter company, flying for the airlines or possibly to fly their own plane. We all have “the next step” almost everything in life has this. For all pilots, there is always something to do when you get more flight time… for private owners once you reach x hundred hours or x thousand hours you might lower you deductible or lower your insurance payments. For charter and airline pilots, you need a certain amount of hours before you can upgrade to the bigger plane or move to the captain’s seat. For airlines, for instance, you must fly as a first officer for 1,000 hours in the airline environment before you are eligible to go to upgrade training and become a captain.
If you want to be a pilot be prepared to be hooked. It’s pretty addicting once you catch the aviation bug. Once I started I knew I wanted to do this full time so I started selling all the toys I had. Motorcycle, gone. Truck, Gone, Car, gone. Cheaper car purchased and off to a four-year aviation college. No bills equal more flight time. More credit cards equal more flight time. Once I racked up as much flight time as I could get with all my ratings needed to be a professional pilot plus a college degree I was off to fly for a living…
That can be an entirely different article so I’ll save that for another time. For now just know it’s easy to get started, the flight schools all have access to loans. Be careful what you get yourself in though. This field is very expensive to get started and the payout doesn’t come for a long time. be prepared to work for low pay for a while, be prepared to live on the road, make sure you significant other understands you will be gone often. It’s not all fun and games when you start flying for a living its hard work traveling all the time. Eating on the road and living out of a small suitcase. But it’s very rewarding. Just know eventually the pay will be there. The life isn’t for everyone that’s for sure. The flight school staff want to share the beauty of flight with us all. They will find a way to help you with the cost of it all. again, it’s not cheap but its possible and its a dream come true.
Enjoy your journey!