Me !
I was, way back then (probably still am) a rather an academic dunce and left Technical School (i.e. Grammar school for the less academic) at 16 with very few qualifications and practically direction-less.
I subsequently worked in all sort of weird jobs, e.g, made cardboard boxes in a card board box factory, laboured on building sites and farms, did a professional diving course and worked in many a crap-filled freezing harbour. I also undertook and completed a ‘toolmakers’ apprenticeship (actually, it’s a very skilled job!) and as part of that I used to do day release to technical college; when there, and for once in my life, I was in an environment where self-motivation was the key – and nothing was more self-motivating than making cardboard boxes or ‘press-tools’ all day long in a factory !
I thrived, and did rather well, finished technical college with a very good Ordinary National Diploma in Engineering studies – good enough in fact to get me to University on a Control Systems Engineering degree.
However at University I was once again surrounded by ‘theorists’ – I hated it, but applied myself enough to get a good degree (2:1).
I left Uni, again directionless, but was offered a employment by an acquaintance who I knew from windsurfing ( I used to be rather good at that – semi-professional ). The job entailed taking the performance graphs for various public transport aircraft (e.g. DC10-30, B747-300) convert them into mathematical equations, thence into Fortran 77 (yes, archaic I know, but this was way back in the very early 1980’s) and subsequently testing my work in a full blown simulator.
It was poling the simulator around that did it for me, i.e. it didn’t take long to realise that flying was what I wanted to do.
Nb. Strangely, as a young child I was always fascinated by aircraft, airports, ships, and buildings – indeed I used to burn the midnight-oil (literally) as a 9-11 year old designing all of them ( I quite fancied myself as an architect ).
I also had a favourite Auntie, who luckily for me lived in Hounslow – I most definitely remember that my greatest delight when visiting her was that she used to take me to Heathrow airport and allow me to watch the aircraft from the roof of one of the new multi-story carparks – from memory, that would have been about 1966 onwards.
However, until my mid twenties, with no family involvement in the aviation business, plus atrocious 1970’s careers advice, and having been written-off at school – I was a very late starter ! I digress.
After a year or so, I moved from the simulator programming environment to graphical CADCAM software production – all written in C on HP-UX.
I then had what appeared to be a stroke of luck – in the back pages of Computer Weekly (or was it Computing) there was a job advert for a systems analyst / programmer required at a young airline (Air Europe) - I applied, and got the job.
The very first day of my employment with AE I walked into the then Chief Pilots office ( a chap called Geoff Baldock – we’re still the best of mates, indeed my youngest lad is his namesake – respect ! ) and announced that I wanted to be an airline pilot. Unlike many before him, he didn’t laugh, and subsequently stood by my through the thick and thin of my roller-coaster ride of an aviation career.
Across the years and with absolutely no funds at all behind me, I was only able to pay for my flying through the money that I earned as an IT professional - I can’t even begin to describe the trials and tribulations that I went through to eventually obtain a flying job - but regardless, all along the way IT/Systems have provided a good living; I’ve been permanent employment and still have a fall-back career (and it pays to remember that you’re only ever one medical away from loosing your professional pilots license).
Nb. My computing CV reads almost as a roll call: VAX / Unix (all flavours) / PC’s / NT client & server/ Pascal / Ada / Fortran / Accell / Vision / Ingres / C (all flavours) / Oracle / Sybase / Informix / DataServer / DB2 / ODBC / lan’s / wan’s / web clients / web servers / systems integration / programming / analysis / project management / consultancy / etc etc etc
Ps. I still keep my hands on by working on some fairly tough IT projects with my present employers – and I’ll never give it up. I love both flying and IT !