What do you do with your pilot licence?

[Builds By Baz]

I find myself in a weird new position in life, but also in this new pursuit of flying.

 

I've wanted to fly all my life and now that I've made the decision to go for it, I am suddenly hit with internal questions like, "What then?"

 

How did it happen for you ladies and gents? Did you enter with a mission to work or just go for fun? Did your goals change along the way? How many got their qual and thought, "That will do?"

 

I spent years working in the back of military aircraft, (Photo below 1999) always coveting that illustrious front seat. I thought it might be interesting to hear your stories.

 

Baz.

[Blueadventures]

For me it's something you want to do, some don't.  I called in a hangar this afternoon as I was on my way home from being at my aircraft.  The pilot there during our conversation said he meet a pilot who had just decided to stop flying; he was 100 years young and started flying at 85; he is another who wanted to fly and did it.  Enjoy your flying endeavour, it's in your blood.  Cheers.

[kgwilson]

Everyones Aviation journey is unique. I have been obsessed with flying ever since I was a little kid. From paper darts to balsa wood cutout spitfires, kites and eventually model aircraft starting with gliders with  aerofoil doped tissue wings & then powered models with 3/4 cc diesel engines & up to 1.5cc at around age 12. A friend of my father was a pilot during WW2 & owned a Tiger Moth & he took me for my first flight. I was 9 or 10. Girls & motorbikes dominated during my teens & I travelled the world in my early 20s & saw early hang gliders in Switzerland & returning to NZ in 75 got in to hang gliding which I flew right in to the 90s. I flew my first powered aircraft in the late 70s, a weight shift controlled Quicksilver, & then began my journey to obtaining a PPL initially in a C150, then C152, C172 & my favorite touring aircraft Piper Archer 2 (PA28-181). I built my current aircraft over nearly 5 years from 2010 & fly this currently though I don't go on long trips these days.

When the sun is shining and the air is still I still get the same buzz with an early morning trip down the river and along the coast or just somewhere not too far away.

 

I have always related to the poem by John Gillespie Magee in a letter to his parents in 1941.

 

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air ....

 

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew—

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.