Flying Off the Rust
The musing drone of a small plane some ten miles away seemed natural in the clear still skies of a Sunday morning. It might have been someone taking a lesson, or perhaps it was just a pilot peeling some rust off of his wings. People who fly for pleasure and/or the occasional business trip often will go up for no reason at all but to stay familiar with the controls. There are a lot of them. Not only do you have to know what that wall of instruments is saying, but more important, you have to maintain a cellular feel for the aircraft. All the book-learnin' and lessons are fine, but if you don't get up in the air every now and then, you lose your feel for the controls.
Even pilots with the airlines report that they begin to lose an edge if they're not flying for a week or two, and they fly many hours at a time, for days in a row. Yours truly recently logged his 300th hour in the cockpit, and a quarter of that time, before I received my private pilot's certificate, someone else was Pilot-in-Command. I'm reporting my junior status. I'm not trying to accumulate hours, as are so many who get their license on their way to a front seat in an airliner. Those people need lots of hours, and they try to rack them up on someone else's dime, mostly by giving flight instruction.
Flying commercial can be very lucrative, with senior pilots making upwards of $150,000 a year for a part-time gig; they are only allowed to fly so many hours a day, so many days a month. But there aren't a lot of those jobs, and because they look so desirable, there are a lot of jobs below them, many of them like co-piloting a prop plane for a commuter line paying less than $20,000.
As much as I enjoy flying, and sharing the pleasure in conversations with people who seem truly interested, I'm not one to teach people how to fly. First, because I don't need to log time, and second because I'm working hard enough at flying better myself to be able to concentrate on instructing someone else. I make it a purpose to fly for at least an hour every two weeks, just to maintain a foundational degree of efficiency.
Most general aviation fatalities happen when a student or private pilot has 50-350 hours; instrument-rated pilots suffer the worst having logged 250-550 hours. Those statistics from a recent book on the subject called The Killing Zone. Also, insurance industry statistics suggest that pilots who reach levels of 300, 500, and 1000 hours exhibit a certain amount of cockiness. At this point, I can't imagine ever feeling cocky about flying, though I do appreciate a sense of increased grounding -- perhaps a bad choice of words -- in my accumulation of experience.
This past week, I made two flights. One was a trip on my own to Santa Rosa, which takes four hours to reach by car and one by plane. The second was a flight to Marin to connect with a lawyer from Wisconsin who wanted to meet with Linda. We were back and forth in less than three hours of flying time; driving would have taken eight. Both trips were for business in IRS terms; both were a pleasure to fly. Gotta stay proficient.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
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