Guest Blog: CFI Navel Gazing

The text message was familiar: "Have to cancel today's lesson." The accompanying sad-face emoji didn't mitigate the fact that too many flying lessons never get off the ground, stalled by self-imposed realities of alleged real-world issues. Over a quarter-century of instructing, I estimate about half of all appointments cancel and not simply because the student suddenly remembers a parole hearing or spots his name in the obituaries. Cancellations can be due to illness, job demands—boss demands you show up—poor weather or even good weather that might lure a student to the beach rather than into the sky. Flight instructing in old airplanes is no way to make a living, but it is a great life, provided you …

Don't do the math. I charge $45 per hour (plus sales tax) for instruction, which no doubt has you thinking, "That's darn near as much as my yoga instructor gets!" I'll admit it's a racket, getting paid to go for airplane rides with some of the most creative aviators on and above the planet. When lessons aren't cancelled I get to skid through uncoordinated turns, dive toward runways in nose-first approaches that would qualify for kamikaze merit badges and explain, again, that the crosswind doesn't go away simply because we've made it to the vicinity of the centerline without taking out the runway lights or peeling the tires off the rims. All this in the comfort of an aluminum can with little cabin heat in Midwest winter and sweat-box luxury in August. Oddly, I love it.

When someone asks, "What'd ya spend becoming a pilot?" I shrug. I dunno, a lot, too much, not enough. Doesn't matter. It's like asking what it cost to raise my daughter. Same answers with similar results. It doesn't make fiscal sense, but, man, it's worth it. Even if she isn't a pilot … and is marrying a New Jersey boy.

Getting into flying because there's the shimmer of a gilt-edged airline job on the horizon is like going to medical school because your doctor drives a Porsche, and wouldn't it be cool to park yours beside hers at the country club and skip tipping the valet parking attendant who smiles politely and then spins doughnuts in the back parking lot with your Teutonic status symbol while you're inside sipping mimosas, which you don't really like, but they're a thing now, so you do. Yeah, I used to be a parking attendant.* That's what happens. Anyhow, wrong motivation for flying.

Some of us fly because there's a sky up there, and we don't belong down here. I teach flying because I'm too old to sit, as I did in grade school, staring out the window at airplanes plowing through clouds while forced to listen to gravity-challenged adults complain that I'm daydreaming again. They make it sound like a bad thing. I fly because I'm a daydreamer. I teach because there's a grass runway beside my hangar, and there's no greater satisfaction than sitting in the back seat of a tandem taildragger as the student suddenly understands how to gently hold the stick back and into the wind, while keeping the nose pointed down the runway with rudder as this planet that binds accepts our offering of stalled wings and wheels splitting puddles and slinging mud, before the throttle moves forward to launch our daydream, again, into the unteachable, unlearnable sky.

It's the other half. Half of all flying lessons get cancelled, not from lack of interest but from misinterpretation of reality. For the other half with the students who distrust reality, I'll fly and teach in a fool's effort to learn how it is that humans, we clumsy bags of water, bone and giddy notions can—with relatively little effort—leave planet Earth at will. Luckily, I'm no closer to finding the answers than I was the day in 1973 when a flight instructor, charging $4 per hour, pointed at a faded Cessna 150 and said in a Sam Elliot voice straight from the sky, "This is a wing; it produces lift, the giver of life …"

*Best car to spin on an icy New Jersey parking lot? 1971 Cadillac Eldorado.