Flying Through Life. robert Psy.D. firth

to make some money as a professional pilot.

      So, what does it take to be a proficient and safe pilot? First let’s define the terms. It is one thing for a pilot of a Cessna 150 to fly in his home area under VFR conditions and quite another to navigate a high performance aircraft into busy airports in bad weather.

      Flying, for example, into Aspen Colorado, probably one of the nations most unforgiving high altitude airports is a lot more demanding of a pilots judgment, knowledge and skills than piloting a light single engine aircraft into Pompano airport on a sunny day in Florida. We are talking here about two different animals. One is a professional aviator and the other a weekend, fly for fun, pilot. There is no comparison.

      The weekend pilot with two or three hundred hours can learn, as we all have, to be a proficient, all weather pilot but, not overnight. There is absolutely nothing that can be taught or bought that will help him except to get out there and do it. Experience is not for sale and no one has learned how to “can it.”

      The process of becoming a professional pilot requires a final step. As mentioned, one has to obtain a private and then commercial license followed by the instrument and multi-engine ratings and then, finally, after logging 1200 hours, the ATP, Airline Transport License. Each requires considerable time and effort, practical and written tests have to be passed, training aircraft located and paid for and all this cannot be done overnight.

      For a person to spend the time and effort to reach the point where he might be considered for a co-pilots position with a charter operator or an airline, that person has likely determined to pursue a goal of becoming a professional pilot. Once there he can begin learning what the job is really all about.

      Let’s discuss what it’s not about. Flying at a professional level, is seventy percent judgment and thirty stick and rudder skills. Both the weekend pilot and the professional aviator may have the same motor skills to maneuver the aircraft but the overwhelming requirement for flying in all conditions into high density complex airspace is judgment.

      Judgment is a derivative of the pilots accumulated aviation knowledge meaning his professional education, flight experience and the ability to process this against the particulars of any given situation to make a correct decision. The pilot, who after thirty or forty years of flying without incident, accident or hangar stories, is a pilot who has demonstrated a high degree of good judgment.

      Safe flying, which is the end- game of all flying, begins well before any flight leaves the ground. Safe pilots don’t have financial, marital, alcohol, health or drug problems. Safe pilots are not born, they are made. After one has flown a thousand or more 200’ &1/2 mile approaches into and out of high density airports and flown ten to fifteen thousand hours with another pilot who has even greater experience, the first officer is ready to assume

      command.

      He is, by this time, confident of his ability and knows his aircraft. He can likely draw out the ships systems and label the various filters, pumps motors, electrical buses and can tell you the pressures, quantities, airspeeds, weights and the assorted multitude of numbers that make up the aircraft systems, performance and limitations. He can see in his mind the approach paths, taxi ways and parking aprons of dozens of airports worldwide. He has flown many times the complex approaches and departures into and from these airports and understands very well the effects of weather along his routes. He knows how to read forecasts and how to evaluate them against the performance of the aircraft and his own skills.

      There is no amount of classroom education that can instill this level of judgment in the novice pilot. Only by spending ten or fifteen years flying eighty hours a month can one develop the requisite judgment ( air sense) and knowledge to safely fly in all-weather high density conditions.

      My Father learned to fly in the 1920’s. He was fourteen and ran away from home to live in a hangar at Wings Field in Camden New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia. Dad slept on an iron framed army cot in the back office without heat or hot water. He cleaned aircraft, pumped gas and helped the mechanic, all in exchange for an hour a week of flight training.

      After a year or so he had his first license issued by the CAA, the Civil Aviation Authority and the predecessor to today’s FAA. The owner of the circus had Dad flying passengers to Atlantic City and, at times, returning at night, flying low, in light snow following the Black Horse Pike. One dark and stormy night some drunk left a bottle in the cockpit that lodged under the rudder pedal, Dad had to climb from the back to the front cockpit to get it free. He told this story to one of his fellow flying buddies when I was a kid, so I guess it was one of those things that stayed in his memory. (Wings field, circa 1930, above)

      On weekends in those days many people from Philadelphia would drive to the local airports to watch the pilots and their aircraft - flying in the thirties was still new enough to be of great interest. There was some Vine street drunk, who would show up every weekend to jump from Dad’s aircraft with a pair of bat like wings and soar around for a while before opening his parachute. This was an immense crowd pleaser.

      One particularly cold and bleak Sunday the ceiling was a little low and perhaps the sprits of the mad bat were reflecting the barometer or perhaps it was the spirits he consumed, who knows, anyway, the flying bat either forgot or forgot on purpose, to pull his rip cord. He hit the frozen ground at a hundred and twenty mph, hard enough to bounce twenty feet and become quite dead. The crowd got their moneys worth that weekend. The following Saturday Dad and the other pilot Tommy O’Brian, had to flip a nickel to see who would be Bat-Man. Dad won, Tommy broke his leg and become a chemical engineer. Dad went on to fly for forty years with Eastern Airlines and the rest is history as they say.

      One job I had while following my Father’s footsteps, was “flogging” Florida swamp land all over the USA for a company called Gulf American Land Corporation (GALC). We traveled with a team of about ten guys from one small town to even smaller towns, staying at Mom and Dad and Dad and Lad roadside motels and the occasional Holiday Inn, hosting pre-arranged dinner parties. The company was owned by the Rosen brothers, Jack and Leonard. These guys had made a few bucks selling “Charles Antel Formula no. 9” which was some slimy sheep dip supposedly made with lanolin that was real snake oil. It was supposed to grow hair on a bowling ball and other wondrous things. The Rosen Bros. hired Harry Dempsy, a retired “carnie” to help flog this glop. Harry was as bald as a bowling ball and kept his hat on when flogging the sheep dip.

      Harry used to sell “Hoosters Stomach Bitters” on the street corners of Chicago. He had a pet monkey wearing a bell boy suit with a little pill-box hat. Harry played music on a box with a crank handle and suckered the passing marks to buy this stuff. One day, a lady in a classy white dress kept trying to pet the monkey. Harry said, “lady d’monky don lik youse- so beat it” She persisted and finally the monkey, annoyed and frustrated, jumped on her head and took a huge crap- she screamed and sputtered- Harry said, “look lady- I tol youse, d’monkey didn lik youse!”

      Harry had first been hired by the Rosen brothers, Leonard and Jack (Julius) who, after selling their parent’s delicatessen in Baltimore, had him reading the bible on a local radio station selling plastic covered tin 45 RPM records to little old ladies scrubbing the white steps of the Baltimore slums. These poor women would play the records to their loutish, drunken husbands to drive the devil out of the poor wretch.

      This was a profitable scam until the United Council of Churches obtained an injunction and took him off the air. I guess this was considerably before the coming of age of the legalized televangelists or Harry would still be on - after all, the two Jewish boys from Baltimore were selling a lot of records.

      Following the plastic records and Charles Antel scams, the Rosens and Harry drove down to Florida wondering what profitable activity they could find where they might be left alone for a few years. Naturally, they, as many crooks before, were attracted to swamp peddling. Florida land in the early sixtys