As I hinted at in my last, rather vague posting, I've decided it's finally time to get down to it and pursue a career in commercial aviation.
I've made two runs at a pilot's licence already. At the age of 14, and with the help of my grandfather, I'd taken all the lessons I needed before I could go ahead and solo. Unfortunately you can't solo until the age of 16 in America, and so the lessons were put on hold. By the time I was of legal age, my grandfather's interest in backing them had waned. Then, a couple of years ago, when our newly-purchased flower business was thriving in the stronger economy, I decided to have a second go at it under my own power. This time, I made several solo flights. Taking the plane up that final time, unsupervised, on a crystal clear and calm day when you could see from Provincetown to Boston, and bringing it down for half a dozen perfect landings--was undoubtedly the happiest 1.3 hours of my life.
At that point, we had the opportunity to take advantage of a friend's divorce and purchase a house at a very reasonable price (by Cape Cod standards). This made for a wonderful investment, but it also tied up any "play money" I could throw away on flight lessons which offered no hope of financial returns.
Now it's two years later. The economy has slowed substantially. We've sold the flower business for enough money to keep us out of trouble. (It was a good time to leave. Three other flower shops opened in the area in the past year, and it would have taken a massive investment in advertizing and merchandising to compete.) And we'll soon be able to sell the house under the two-year exemption to capital gains taxes.
I've kept my current job throughout our ownership of the flower shop, and now I find myself at a turning point where I can either buy the place, or take a substantial pay-cut from whatever other buyers come along.
My wife and I have desperately wanted to get off the Cape for several years, but this peninsula has a hold on people, and the opportunities it's presented to us (for which we are honestly very thankful) have only served to strengthen our roots. Still, as I come in to work every day it's clearer that I don't want the stress of owning a shop again. Too many employee headaches, too much sleep lost over roller-coaster seasonal sales figures. And there's the tedium of it. Six years really is enough to spend in a place like this, however wonderfully my employers have treated me.
But what to do now? We thought living on a boat for a while. It could be an affordable, and wonderful, way to experience, say, San Francisco for a few years. But what to do while we're there? Work another job like this one? Bleh. Continued work in retail feels just dismal, at this point.
This guy recently sold his house in Oakland to return to school for a career in video-game design. I thought about that for a bit, too. But the kind of pleasure I get from playing video games won't carry through to the tedious work of coding, designing, or debugging them. I don't want to finish school just to find I hate doing what I was trained to do. This was the fear that kept me from going to school in the first place!
It hit me a couple of months back that some fields of medicine could be both fascinating and rewarding. But the same fears applied: after investing eight years and hundreds of thousands of dollars into an education, am I going to come out of it as someone who wakes up happy to go to work and pay these debts off? And would I be able to handle the death of patients? Do you get numb to that stuff, after a while? If sales figures stressed me out, how would I handle inevitable deaths?
A friend of mine recently completed medical school and is practicing emergency medicine in Philadelphia. When I asked him if he was happy with where his education led him, he said, "You know, this is really the only job I've ever been able to imagine myself in, where I could feel satisfied and make a living."
I don't feel that sort of drive towards medicine--I certainly haven't been imagining myself doing it since childhood.
But aviation! The seed of that desire has been planted in me since forever, and it's as if for most of my life I've been making an effort to ignore it. Some crappy song about an old airport came over the folk station (it's amazing what these folk singers find to sing about, isn't it?) while I was putting a sku label on the ten-millionth cigar of my career, and I thought about how much I missed going to the airport, pre-flighting the plane, lining the nose up with the runway centerline and pussing the throttle knob smoothly all the way in and feeling the pressure of the seat against your back as you accelerate. And then I thought, duh, here I've been thinking about what career to dive into for the past several months while the same pilot's logbook I've been carrying around for half of my goddamned life is sitting in my closet waiting to be filled up!
I felt free and liberated, like a child on the first day of Summer Vacation who wakes up and realizes he is in full control of his forseeable future. I carried this feeling around with me for four days before I said anything, to be sure it wouldn't go away. It didn't. I mentioned it to my wife. She's super-paranoid about my doing anything dangerous, on account of this one time a car hit me at 65 miles per hour. We were in the car when I mentioned this idea. I expected the interior of the car to go ripe with a composty smell as she shit some bricks.
She didn't. What she said was, "Great. You love planes! Why didn't you think of this before?"
Indeed.
What has kept me from it, then? A sense of stubborn independence--not wanting to rely on my family to finance expensive flight lessons. Lack of my own means, and a fear of debt, preventing myself from assuming student loans in the pursuit of any goal. A mistaken assumption that following a career as rigid and precise as aviation would turn me into someone unable to appreciate my other passions: books, poetry, video games, arts and ideas. Finally, a stubborn reserve of self-doubt. Taking the controls of an aircraft and defying gravity seems ballsy enough. Doing it commercially, getting paid for it, and having responsibility for other people's lives seems downright hubristic. Could I possibly accept such a responsibility?
Recently I've come to figure, why not? I've done lots of things in the past several years I'd never have thought possible: gotten married, bought and sold land, houses, a business, written a novel in 30 days. Why not this? Why not, now that I'm finally ready to admit it's what I want more than anything?
...
I'm posting all of this a little bit prematurely, perhaps, in hopes that having it out here will push me to follow through. There's lots to do, now: sell this house, check out flight schools, pick one, give my notice at work, relocate, and then, you know, actually learn to fly. The house sale can't take place until the end of October, so that gives me a little time to work out all these changes. But not much. I've got a lot of decisions to make between now and then. And according to this report, I shouldn't wait any longer than I have to:
...assuming you are a competent pilot and continually progress in your upgrades, the time it takes you to begin your career may have more to do with your total career earnings than anything else. What can those earnings be? For example, a commercial pilot with a 35 year career (beginning at age 25 and retiring at age 60) can earn in excess of $12 million over a career. This includes estimated benefits and retirement funding and assumes he or she begins with a major regional airline and progresses to a major global carier. So what could a delay of six months cost you? Since the loss will come at the end of your career, when you are earning the highest rate and will be required to retire, it will very likely amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Looks like I've got some catching up to do.
