Page 6 - Dear aviator...

aeroclub in northern Italy; it was with him that I went for my first flight in a small
single engine aircraft, a German-built Scheibe SF-25 Falke motor-glider. But that
was just about when reality started to rear its ugly head. The cost for earning a
licence in Italy was (and still is) prohibitive: aviation in Italy is a pastime for the
wealthy and professional positions within aviation were (and still are) usually
reserved for the ex-military. That, together with puberty, was what caused my
interest in aviation to start to sputter and go dormant. My interest shifted to other
things as I suppose is normal for a teenager. I still occasionally leafed through my
progressively out-dated books and I watched documentaries, but most of my
remaining interest was mostly directed at the history and development of aviation -
a sign that I was starting to look more and more often to the past, which would feed
my academic study of archaeology. Later in life I developed an ongoing layman’s
interest in the space race and astronautics and once every few years, when reading
about the test pilots of the 1950s and 1960s, the itch would start to surge again. I
would then forcibly quash that renewed excitement as I knew that I simply was in
no position to be able to satisfy it, not even as a hobby. That was probably why I
took so much pleasure in building and painting model aircraft, as a way to keep the
hunger at bay. Like everyone, I had my favourites and I kept alternating between
the - at the time - latest generation fighters (F-14 and F-16) and those splendid
WW2 machines such as the B-17, Spitfire and P-51.

The money

“Why did you wait until your late 30s to start training?”
It was mentioned before but let’s drive the point home: learning to fly is very
expensive. As you can imagine this severely limits the ways you can go about it.
- The lucky ones are those who are wealthy and can train on their own time,
at their own pace and not worry about money being siphoned out of their
wallet at an astonishing rate. These are the ones who can then purchase
their own aircraft and simply fly for the pure enjoyment of it; I, and most of
the fellow pilots I have become acquainted with, are not members of this elite
group;
- Next, you have the pathway that most pilots have undertaken since the
earliest days of aviation. Your regular person who started training at a young
age, perhaps with some help from family and who invested every last penny
earned into aviation, living off of noodle rations and taking a flight lesson
whenever they had collected enough money. They also self studied for the
written exam, perhaps attending a ground-school course for the more
demanding topics. This obviously can have an impact on the time it takes
and the efficiency and effectiveness of training: if you can afford one flight
per week, you’ll do fine; but if you can only afford one flight a month, it will
take more overall flights to become proficient as it will take more flight hours
to consolidate your skills. The general understanding is that these pilots are
more skilled as they had a vested interest in getting as much out of their
flights and instruction time since they were paying for it one penny at a time.

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