I often think how many great friends I have made via GA flying.
Meeting up with them makes flying so much more worthwhile. Even if (or especially if) there is almost no aeroplane talk 
Peter wrote:
I often think how many great friends I have made via GA flying.
That ends the very moment you decide to earn your living with GA flying. You have lots and lots of good friends and flying buddies so long as there are jobs for everybody. But in times like now where decent flying jobs (both in the airlines and GA) are rare, everybody fights for himself. Your former best friends will let you down quicker than you ever imagined. And most of your new “friends” are only interested in a job they may get because they know you… Therefore in my professional flying environment I tend to be rather formal. There are some colleagues with which I am not communicating on first-name-basis because I know they will report every bit of confidential information that I might give them.
Solution: fly privately only.
I was in a similar situation years ago and thought to myself “boy, I am enjoying flying way too much to have it spoilt by the pressures and restrictions of doing it for a living”.
boscomantico wrote:
Solution: fly privately only.
But that means that I would have to work in the office again, 10 hours a day, 5 days per week. Spending whole days in boring progress meetings where endless Ecxel sheets will be shown while I can see a glimpse of contrails in the blue sky barely visible through the half-drawn blinds. No. Never again. Not one day, not even if they promote me to head-of-something… I rather make the contrails myself and have my friends outside my working environment.
Well, yes, as soon as you introduce money into friendships, everything changes…
But look at the great fly-ins we have had here at EuroGA. And every week or two there is somebody meeting up somewhere.
what_next wrote:
But that means that I would have to work in the office again, 10 hours a day, 5 days per week. Spending whole days in boring progress meetings where endless Ecxel sheets will be shown while I can see a glimpse of contrails in the blue sky barely visible through the half-drawn blinds. No. Never again. Not one day, not even if they promote me to head-of-something…
Just a “like” for that paragraph! I hope everyone can find a way to escape that misery. And I met a guy, now a software developer, who was a pilot and gave it up because it was “boring”. No he is stuck in front of a PC every day and thinks he found something interesting for life…
Vladimir wrote:
Just a “like” for that paragraph! I hope everyone can find a way to escape that misery.
I find it hugely interesting how this is regarded very differently by different people.
Personally, I love flying now. I don’t love my job in the same way but I would not want to trade it for a flying job. I want flying to be exciting, to be special. I don’t ever want flying to become a routine thing in my life. Of course, I want the routine to fly safely… but I don’t want it to be the “aaaah, do I really have to get up?”-sort-of-routine early in the morning – only to be met by colleagues as described by what’s next that take all the social fun out of my work life. It’s like I love New York, but I would never want to live there. I much rather live in a convenient place like I do and visit NY every now and then to feel the magic. Living there, I would most certainly loose the feel for that magic soon.
Fully agree. Flying must be something extraordinary in my weekly/monthly routine, that’s what allows it to remain something special every time.
I did fly full time, as a flight instructor for one season, 10 hours a day. While that was a fantastic experience (probably learned as much myself as my students!), I was pretty much “done with it” after 6 months. Can’t imagine how I could have proceded like that for years.
I did fly full time, as a flight instructor for one season, 10 hours a day. While that was a fantastic experience (probably learned as much myself as my students!), I was pretty much “done with it” after 6 months. Can’t imagine how I could have proceded like that for years.
That’s probably the best of both worlds and I can very well imagine doing something like that in the foreseeable future for a limited period of time! You obviously need to make the investment in the FI rating etc. without expecting it to ever “pay off” in a financial sense (but then when does it ever, in aviation…).
