Tomorrow morning i will get up,give my son his breakfast and kiss my wife on the way out the door.I will get in my little car and drive to the airport.I will then make my way to the hangar in about 38*c + find out if it is my turn to fly (2 crew operation) and if so i will check the weather,notams,read and initial files,etc before i make my way to the line office where i will check which aircraft i am due to fly,go outside,preflight,sign the techlog and then grab a coffee and wait for the call to say that the pax are ready.
I have been doing this or similar in crew rooms from the Irish Sea,to the west atlantic,to the north sea,to St.Georges channel,to the USA,to the middle east for 20 years.I have been lucky enough to have flown both fixed wing and rotary both as a crewman and as a pilot.
I have been soaked,frozen and baked over that period of time on innumerable occasions and have cursed and ranted on about why the hell i ever got into this business
Money has never been a factor except now with the responsibility of a family to consider, i have to be conscious about what i earn.
So why am i sitting up in the middle of the night writing this ?
Because one day i looked up into the sky and saw a silver bird go over my head and i knew(if a 5 year old can know) that somehow i had to get my feet of the ground and into that sky.Years of building model aircraft,days sitting at the fence below the threshhold during school holidays,scrounging pocket money to buy Flight and poring over those old photographs of past airshows,classic aeroplanes and classic pilots.
And here i am,flying for 20 years and still looking up for the silverbird or any flying machine that happens to drone by.
Helicopters,i love them.I made a conscious choice to go the rotary route and have never regretted it.They are the nearest thing to levitiation that we can find.Fixed wing,i love them,nothing like diping a wingtip into a fluffy cu on a summers evening and seeing a students face light up.This is the kind of flying i like to do and i don't feel like i have missed out on anything.
Flying,what is there to say except that apart from my wife and son nothing has given me as much pleasure and frustration,boredom and excitement,fun and challange in my life.
So for thoses of you who are fed up with your lives as helicopter pilots or as fixed wing pilots perhaps you need to be looking elsewhere or perhaps you need to look back and try to find what you have lost.I do not regard myself as an underachiever or an overachiever,i have a job that is also my hobby,so i am lucky.
Would i start all over again ? absolutely. Would i favour rotary over fixed wing ? Yes if i want to remain having fun in what i do.Thats whats good for me,it doesn't necessarily mean that it is good for someone else.There have been many post from people who have done it the military way,the self improver way,those who like it,those who don't.Each to there own so long as they get something out of it and don't snipe at those who are not in their camp.
Je ne regrete rien !