The Sacred Six Flight Instruments
I was at an interview last week and got to talking about my flying. I explained I saw a kid in my Junior High history class with an “Aviation Ground School” textbook under his seat and asked him about it. Did you know you could get your pilot’s license at sixteen? How kewl! Sign me up, right?
At the time, I figured on a career ultimately ending with me being part of a crew of United Airlines pilots flying from SanFrancisco to Honolulu three days a week for a skillion dollars a year. It didn’t quite work out that way and I’m still happy about it.
The shine comes off of most jobs after a month or so, it seems. And it’s surprising but it doesn’t seem to make a difference what the job even is. Late night TV talk show hosts, doctors, lawyers, realtors and everyone else, it seems, experiences this fairly soon after starting a new job.
I can remember three distinct times in my life when I was at a kind of crossroads. If I wanted, I could have put in the effort at those times and come away with all of the paperwork and experience and technique to be commercial pilot and… didn’t.
I’m happy about it now because when I look in my logbook and read over all of the flights I was on, I have mostly happy memories. The sunset on this flight. Taking a girlfriend up on that flight. Going all of the way to the other side of the horizon and having a supremely shiddy hamburger. Good times, great oldies. I never rounded out of bed in the morning and said to myself, “Aw, Hell! I have to go flying, today!” Every entry in my logbook is there because I wanted to go fly, that day. Ever hour seems almost holy to me, now.
I’m convinced I made the right choice.
