For all the Right Reasons

The alarm on my phone rings through the darkness of my bedroom, pulling me out of my sleep and back into the world of the awake. I reach over to silence the alarm and roll back over to allow my eyes a few minutes to adjust to the darkness. As I lay in bed, my mind and body wage a war over whether to stay in bed, or heed my phone's alarm and get up. While my body is offering convincing arguments as to why staying in bed is the optimal choice this morning, ultimately my mind wins out the fight, just as it has for as long as early mornings have been a part of my job. I stumble my way through the darkness out of my room, closing the door quietly behind me. From here I will follow the routine I have perfected since early mornings have become a fact of life, and in the process, coax my mind into spooling up from simply being awake to functioning. I make my way to the kitchen to pour a glass of milk and start breakfast before jumping in the shower. The clock on the oven reads 2:30. Looking out the kitchen window at the apartment buildings to the north of mine, all of the windows are black save one, from which light is spilling out onto the parking lot below. I wonder what obligation or lack thereof has my neighbours to the north up at this hour. While I don't harbour any special attachment to this particular hour of the day, I have grown fond of the quiet which envelops the world during these early morning hours. The thud of railcar's couplings being pulled together in the railyard to the north breaks the silence, prompting me to continue on with getting ready for work. Now out of the shower and dressed, I finish up breakfast, and check the weather and notams for the days flights to get an idea of what I will be up against at work. Heading out the door to the car I straighten my tie in the mirror, and double check that I have my keys before locking the door behind me. Today is a pretty normal day, if there exists such a thing in the world of charter flying. The first officer and myself will position the plane at the Esso, across the airport from our hanger, for 6:00 to make our planned departure time of 6:30. Assuming the passengers are on time and the weather cooperates we will be in our hotel room in Grande Prairie by about 8:30, where we will sit for 7 or so hours before departing back to Edmonton this evening. By the time we are finished work tonight, the first officer and myself will have been on duty for 15 hours, with about 2.5 of those 15 hours having been spent in the air. While today is not a particularly challenging day, days like these can be nonetheless tiring given the length of time we will spend at work.

Over the course of the past few months I have been afforded, sometimes subjected, to the views that the general public holds of aircraft and those who fly them. Some of those views have some basis in reality, although many are relics of a bygone era, leftovers from the golden age of air travel when it was considered a privilege to fly, when the noise from jet aircraft was deafening, and when pilots as a whole were very well paid and respected. On the day described above, our passengers would have only seen the two and a half hours that we shared together while in the air. They wouldn't have seen the work that would go into making the flight happen before departure and after our arrival. While I am sure, with time, our regular passengers begin to get a sense of what our job entails between rotation and touchdown and make opinions based on what they are seeing, the reality is that they are only seeing a fraction of what this line of work entails. Pieces, but not the entire puzzle.

Sitting down in the office of the flight school I was considering training with, my parents and I were bombarded with visions of a bright future in aviation. The owner of the school spoke of the cornucopia of opportunities that would be created due to a flood of retirees at the airline level. This outgoing flood of senior pilots was forecast to create a pilot shortage around the time that I would be finishing my training, opening doors of opportunity that would lead to the promise of high paying jobs. While I wasn't entirely sure that the airlines was where I wanted to end up, and not particularly concerned with how much I would be making when I did get a flying position, the owner's rhetoric was convincing. With time I would come to learn that the flood of retiring airline pilots would be something more akin to a trickle, and that while high paying jobs did exist, there existed more minimum wage flying jobs than the high paying variety.
Talking with people while getting signatures to help keep the airport open, I was surprised by how many made mention of the deep pocketed aircraft owners and pilots who call the city airport home. Hearing this, I would laugh quietly and explain that while the city is home to some wealthy aircraft owners and pilots, most are everyday people earning average wages. Some did take the time to listen, however many brushed me off as being another overpayed pilot.

In another conversation with a gentleman who was undecided as to whether or not he would sign the airport petition, the gentleman, piecing together that I was a pilot, asked if it was true that pilots could only work 10 days a month. Aiming to keep my answer relatively simple, I told the gentleman that while there are regulations governing how much pilots can fly, which could have them flying 24 out of 30 days or more depending on the type of operation, their schedules are typically dictated by how busy the companies they work for are. My schedule personally has been relatively slow for the past year and a half, as aviation has been feeling the effects of the recession, although I have had months where at the height of the economic boom, I came close to reaching the 30 day flight time limit. Although having a slower schedule at work can certainly be nice to catch up on things like housework, any day that I am not scheduled to fly, I am placed on reserve where I must be available to fly with a little over an hours notice. The only exception to this are my six scheduled days off a month. When I first began flying charter, I lived 30 minutes from the airport, which meant I would have to be within 20 or so minutes range of my place, or carry work clothes with me wherever I went to ensure I could make it to the airport on time if a flight came up. Being on reserve was a strange adjustment for me, as things which I took for granted as a flight instructor where I made my own schedule, like having a beer after work, or a glass of wine with dinner, would now have to be cleared through dispatch first. With time, clearing things such as wine with dinner or going for a bike ride became second nature, and now while I am on holidays it seems odd to not have to call to check in with dispatch.

Over the course of the few months that I collected signatures for the airport, I was introduced to a number of peoples perceptions of what my life as a pilot must be like. Despite the perceptions, the reality of the situation is that I will probably never make a fortune as a pilot, have 20 days off a month, or capture the imagination of the non-flying public like the Earharts, Yeagers, or Sullenbergers of the world, nor do I want to. I didn't choose flying as my career because of the money, the respect, or the time off. I became a pilot because I love flying, because I had a yearning that could not be quelled from the confines of an office building, and because there were no openings left in the train engineer class. I can think of no better reasons.

"Isn't it crazy that in a world full of people, only some want to fly?"