Comment by blantonl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blantonl | Hacker News Reader

I just recently went through the process at age 49 to get my pilot's license. Purely for fun, however the vast majority of the students that I trained with were just like many of the hopefuls in this article - pursuing a high paying career.

I could write a book about flight school management dynamics. The personalities, the hopefuls, the dreamers, the wild power dynamics between a flight school and a student who desperately wants to get to the airlines (the promise land). The instructors, who all were just recently students now grinding out hours to qualify for an airline job. Safety. Studying and learning. Relationships. Accidents.

The financial aspects are incredibly risky for many. The statistics: only 22% of students who begin training for the first step - a private pilot license - end up finishing. For those wanting to make a career or progress further, there's your instrument rating (to fly in bad weather), your commercial license (to fly for money), your flight instructor license (so you can teach - which essentially is your only path to gaining experience/hours without having to pay for it out of pocket), and then your Air Transport license, which ... airlines. That requires 1500 hours of experience.

It truly was one of the more fascinating adventures I've done.

>teach - which essentially is your only path to gaining experience/hours without having to pay for it out of pocket

Flying for a military organization is another path, is it not?

Or do the airlines no longer want former military pilots? I know they used to hire a lot of them.

Yes, this is an avenue into the career of being an airline pilot. However being a military pilot doesn't directly translate to being what is essentially a bus driver, and there is extensive retraining that has to occur.

But yes, the airlines recruit and bring in a ton of military pilots.

A few months ago a former Navy guy mentioned to me that you can tell if your pilot is Navy or Air Force by the landing. Air Force pilots will come in nice and smooth, but Navy pilots, having been trained to land on carriers, will hit hard.

I don’t know if there is truth to that, but if so, I’ve definitely had more than a few Navy pilots.

My cousin - RIP - who was former Air Force, flew for FedEx. He said he preferred flying freight to passengers because you didn't have to worry about being has gradual on the climb out or smooth on the approach and landing and he didn't have to deal with annoying passengers. ;)

Probably the 'optimal' path to a pilot's job would be to fly bulk for the military (boring things like the C130), not the fighters, and transition to a freight airline.

The UPS planes out of Ontario, CA would climb a hell of a lot faster than the passenger jets out of LAX.

It's kind of a fun old wives tale that is humorous, but not really a thing in practice.

Some of the biggest challenges military pilots face transitioning to the airlines are that the vast majority of them worked far more independently in their roles in the military. So cockpit resource management for a lot of them is a huge challenge. Airline pilots also are responsible for a lot more "working with the masses" type work.

No. Any Navy pilot is skilled enough to flare. The descent rate necessary to land on a carrier is 600-800 feet per minute, which would literally break the landing gear on any airliner, or at least cause a hard landing inspection to have to be done to the airframe looking for potential damage.

Airliners and civilian aircraft "hit hard" for two reasons usually. Either the pilot mildly goofed the flare and "dropped it in" slightly at the end, or else the runway is slick and/or short. In which case, they are aiming to put the aircraft down early and somewhat firmly so they can get on the thrust reversers and/or brakes quickly. A nice greaser of a landing tends to allow the aircraft to float awhile in ground effect, and sometimes the runway is short or slick enough that style points don't count.

> Either the pilot mildly goofed the flare and "dropped it in" slightly at the end

It's funny, I'm sure it's much more difficult in a plane, but this sounds like such a similar experience to thinking you've braked smoothly but accidentally having your final complete stop become sharp because you've overestimated how much speed you've shed.

It's more or less the same thing. You look down the runway as you break your descent rate, and then use your peripheral vision to kind of ease the aircraft down smoothly. But the whole time you're doing this, you're bleeding airspeed and eventually the aircraft doesn't want to fly any more. So if you end up just a smidge higher than you thought . . . clunk.

If you really screw it up, you need to go around, or else you'll have a hard landing. Which is embarrassing at best and career-ending at worst depending on what it does to the aircraft.

> That requires 1500 hours of experience.

That seems awfully low, can you get to be a commercial airline pilot with those hours?

In the boat world, getting the entry level commercial license (OUPV) would take a minimum of 1440 hours on the water (it's measured in days, not hours, so would usually be more). And all you can do with that is transport 6 people or less.

So it sounds wild that with essentially the same number of practice hours you could be piloting an airliner with lots of people!

I'm getting close to retirement and have been considering getting a pilot's license. My only reservation is the expense of fuel/rental when I get bored of flying around my city/area.

Curious to hear more about your journey and how you reckon with the expense of getting into the air for fun.

your reckoning with the expense of getting into the air for fun is this: Go take about $2000 in various denominations and flush it down the toilet. Did that feel good? /s

If that didn't hurt too bad, you're past the first hurdle.

What about all the relatively poor Alaskans who fly small planes around (no roads, tracking animals, checking traps)? What are the dynamics such that they can afford that lifestyle?

there are exceptions to every rule. Alaska and aviation is literally the wild west. The dynamics are they essentially have to make it work.

Like the similar situation in Australia, there's a strong culture of "you'll probably only kill yourself" that allows a lot of things to be overlooked.

Cutting corners.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-tallied-alaska-avi...

> A KUCB and ProPublica analysis has found that in recent years, Alaska has accounted for a growing share of the country’s fatalities from crashes involving small commercial aircraft. Since 2016, 42% of the country’s deaths in these crashes occurred in Alaska, up from 26% in the early 2000s.

The percentage of aircraft crashes in Alaska in the 60s that involved alcohol was depressingly high.

Flying comes down to a "dollars per minute" - you can rent a plane "wet" today for $120-200 an hour (depending on your location) - which translates to $2 per minute or about $1 a mile.

Rental prices include everything so you can own your own plane for less, it'll be ancient and old, and if you do your own maintenance it can be even cheaper.

If you rent less than about 150 hours/year, you probably can't own for less money. (The first minute each year costs about $20K [calendar-based maintenance, hangar, insurance, databases/avionics subscriptions]; every hour after that costs less than renting.)

Most people who own do so for flexibility rather than savings. It usually costs more to own, but it also lets you get a plane you probably can't rent, configure it the way you want, leave all the headsets and supplies in the plane, fly it when you want without scheduling, fly it somewhere and stay for a week without paying daily minimums, etc.

That matches my math when I was flying, if you're not doing 10+ hours a month or have a specific mission that can't be solved by rentals, you're best off renting.

There's a middle-ground which is quite common of the "own a share" - you and five others buy and maintain a plane and "rent" it from yourself - this works great if the times you want to fly don't all overlap.

The partnership angle is a great one!

I really wish I could have found great partners two decades ago. (I'd probably have a lot more money in the bank now, even if it meant we'd have missed more Christmas trips or moved that travel to the airlines because a partner had the airplane.)

If you do the bare minimum to earn your license, but only actually fly a few times/year, you are more dangerous than not earning your license at all. There's a break-in period where you have to get enough hours to be comfortable. Keep that in mind, and it's ok to quit (i.e. just get the license for the challenge of it and never use it if you lose interest, if you have that much money to burn), but pick one of (fly reguarly | dont fly at all).

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