Originally Posted by
blind pew
The corporations recruited mainly A level students for Hamble.. criteria was to be 18 when the course was finished. I was one of the older ones at 20.. the youngest retired last year after 46 years flying for BA. Those in their 20s had more problems than the teens. In those days you couldn't get into a major over 26, the exception was Swissair and that was 29 with significant experience. It's about selection and training. In gliding its a function of age to calculate rough solo time. The younger the better.
In the early 1970s, we used to visit my grand-father in Netley. I would visit Hamble where my father was an apprentice before the war. As a plucky teenager I’d talk to the students who would show me around the Barons.
I can’t over stress what a lasting impression you lot had on me. But I knew it was too far fetched to ever think of being able to do that.
By the mid 1970s, I was a British Airways apprentice engineer. We would spend weeks in the classrooms of TB?, whilst you were going through Trident training next door. My fellow students wouldn’t dare talk to you during break. Not me, I was the one asking you all kind of questions. Again, I thought the world of what you were doing. I figured I might just like to have a go at it myself.
So off I went to Booker and started on this odyssey.
But it was a DanAir HS748 co-pilot that really convinced me that regular people with a burning passion could also make it.
But when I go to ‘you tube’ and watch the series ‘Life as a L3 cadet pilot’, by Jack James Walker.
I can’t help feel that you were not the same as today’s drippy spoilt brat youth.
I can’t stomach the thought of spending a bid period with that type.
As one person wrote, that it made his eyes bleed watching it.