It’s happening at the airport!
For those who are eager to be involved with aviation, and learn to fly, the best place to be is at the airport! Now, this would seem to be a self evident truth, but I’ve been seeing a shift in recent years.
In the old days, people would go to the airport, and hang around for the day. They’d do their hour or so of training or flying, and otherwise hang around, chatting with other pilots and owners, cleaning and fixing, and otherwise helping out. It’s certainly the way I started.
More recently, I go to the airport, and other than the dispatch desk, and the flight planning room, things are pretty quiet. The restaurant is crickets, unless it’s lunch time. It seems that if people are not flying, they’re not there at all. I guess there are many other things to do besides flying. That’s fine, but if flying is your dream, you should be where the dream happens!
I can trace back so many excellent advancements in my early flying to simply being at the right place (the airport) at the right time. Generous pilots would offer me a flight, and later as I progressed, offer me their plane. Further into my career in aviation, I was given ferry and maintenance check flight jobs, because when the boss looked around for someone to do it, I was there! I may not have been the most experienced pilot who could be found, but I did not need to be found, I was there.
Sure, you can read about aviation here, and in an odd way, this is a club. But, the people you get to know while you’re typing on your computer at home are rather removed from taking you for a flight, or hiring you for an aviation job. If you’re at the airport, you have put yourself several steps closer to where you need to be, it just may take some patience there, it won’t go click immediately upon your arrival! Spend your money at the airport café. Maybe it’s not the best coffee ever, but it’s where you want to be, and you want that place to stay open, so the person who might take for a flight might meet you there while they’re buying their coffee! If they drove away in their car, you lost out.
Every now and then, as family life permits me, I fly back to one of my old haunts, for lunch, and to hang around a bit for old time’s sake. Nearly all the people I knew when I was there decades ago are gone now, so not much chatting with the old gang anymore. I’d happily take an eager new pilot for a fly in a unique type – but the new eager pilots don’t seem to be there.
So, for those who are eager in aviation, hang around the airport, invest your time there. Be charming and accessible to other pilots, be willing to help out with jobs, cutting grass, pumping gas, cleaning planes, volunteering at the museum. You’ll learn, and you’ll meet aviation people. Some of those people might be looking for a person to hire in the future. You’d like to be met, and remembered. I’ve been working steadily in aviation since 1975, and for all the jobs I have held, I have never prepared nor submitted a resume, I have been hired by someone I got to know around airplanes. Put yourself where the future you are looking for begins.