Junel Solis’ Story
I am a student pilot at Aeroclub Ciudad de Paraná,
Being a student pilot and a medical student both at the same time comes with a major drawback - time, or its lack thereof. Trying to get my priorities straight, I have assigned more importance to the study of learning how to cure human illness (though I sometimes wish it were the other way around). My passion for flying has thus been relegated to the meager free time I get on the weekends, mainly on Sundays. As such, the weekend flight lesson is something I eagerly look forward to - something I find more exciting and intellectually stimulating than reading hundreds and hundreds of pages of scientific and clinical facts (I hope mom and dad don’t read this or they might cut my funding: flight school, medical school, or both).
The Saturday evening before the flight, I spend about an hour looking at VFR maps, radar images of any weather fronts in the area, mentally rehearsing procedures and interpreting (or rather, trying to interpret) METARs and TAFs for the area. Of course, none of this is burdensome because student pilots like to do these things! With everything set and ready for the hour-long, early-morning bus ride to the flying club (
This particular Sunday found me awake half an hour before the alarm clock. The wind was howling and rain was pouring just outside my window. I got up with a tinge of trepidation; it felt very strange, considering the pleasant cloudless days of the past few weeks. A check of the current weather conditions gave substance to my fears, immediately followed by a concomitant phone call from my instructor - “We can’t go flying today” - which sounded horribly irrevocable.
On a positive note, it’s not as bad as it seems. I only have one more week of classwork to do and then the weekend flight lesson… assuming the rain won’t pay another visit and leave me on the ground to rot with the rest of my medical textbooks. At least not next week. VFR weather to all! Hasta luego. Out.
P.S. I would try to convince you, but I do like medical school and I enjoy the possibilities for learning and improvement in this field. Truly, I enjoy it just as much as my flying lessons. Not convinced yet? Well, what the hell! This is a student pilot’s blog after all.
***an entry from his personal blog
Varrin’s Story
I grew up with no direct connection to the airline industry. I don’t have any family members who are or were airline pilots. The closest connection for me was my parents who both have private pilot certificates. My dad wanted to be an airline pilot when he was a kid growing up but his vision went bad in his teens and perfect vision was necessary at that time (he would have started with a major airline likely sometime in the early-mid 1960’s). After my parents were married they decided to learn to fly, however, they stopped flying before I was born. As a kid growing up, we flew on various airlines for vacations, and I traveled overseas a few times in High School on music tours. By the time I was a senior in high school I had spent a fair amount of time as an airline passenger.My senior year in high school (1991 - 1992) was one of those defining moments in my life. I attended a private school for the first time that year and there was a teacher there by the name of Ralph Bisla who was a pilot. Ralph had his private pilot certificate and was working on his instrument rating when he quit flying for personal reasons. We had computers at the school with Microsoft Flight Simulator on them and we got pretty good at crashing the planes. When Ralph detected an interest in flying, he began to teach a few of us how the thing actually worked, including some instrument flying skills that, unbeknownst to me, would me highly valuable during my flight training.
As I ruled out one music school after another, I became interested in flying, first just for fun. On one particular evening, probably after a trip to the airport with Ralph, I commented to my dad that I’d enjoy learning how to fly. In his seemingly infinite wisdom he replied, “you know, some people do that for a living.” I didn’t think much of it but he went on to mention that he thought they got a good deal of time off and made a good income. I wasn’t so concerned about the money, however, the time off gave me an idea: I could fly for a living and play music on my days off. Over a decade later, that’s exactly where I’m at.
Once I got passed the big hurdles of accepting the haircut, the tie, and all the other stuff a teenage musician doesn’t really want to deal with, I started looking into flight schools to see if the idea was even feasible. I had talked to a few airline pilots along the way but the conversations were typically short and not really about what a career in flying is like. I enjoyed going into the cockpit before flights and just looking at all the knobs and dials and, in the newer airplanes, screens, but I didn’t really have any career information ‘from the horse’s mouth’ until after I started flight school. Of course, the internet wasn’t really popular back then so I couldn’t just go online and read a report like this. After reading this, you’ll be ahead of me.
As I was researching flight schools, I learned some information about flying, though not all of it was exactly accurate. First off, the flight schools all liked to promote their programs in a way that I now understand to be not totally realistic. Second, flight schools tend to glamorize flying careers because, of course, students might not plunk down the big bucks if they don’t really want the big career they’re promoting. I’ll cover more specifics about all that a little later on.
My dad and I wound up going through a few issues of Flying Magazine and making a list of all the flight schools that looked like possibilities. We requested information from, I think, 15 different schools and narrowed down that list down to four that we (my dad and I) wanted to tour: Sierra Academy, Flight Safety, Comair Aviation Academy, and Shields Aviation which is now out of business. Sierra Academy is in Oakland, California, Flight Safety does their ab initio training in Vero Beach, Florida, Comair Aviation Academy’s main campus is in Sanford, Florida, and Shields is now out of business but was in Jacksonville, Florida.
From our tours of those schools, it looked then (and I still think) like all four of them were good schools. The quoted prices varied quite a bit. I don’t recall the exact numbers but I think Shields was cheapest at a little under $20,000, and Flight Safety was most expensive at a little over $40,000. In the end, Comair won out for several reasons. First, it looked like the quality of facilities and training at Flight Safety and Comair were a little bit better than at the other two schools (though all four appeared excellent). Second, more a negative, Flight Safety was considerably more expensive than Comair. In other words, Comair was, at the time, competitive price wise. Third, and most importantly, Comair was (and still is) owned by Comair Airlines which brought a couple of advantages from our perspective: they would likely have financial resources that independent flight schools wouldn’t have and might be around longer, and they had a program which provided a clearly defined path to an airline job.
After our tours were complete and we had ‘done our homework’, we agreed that Comair Aviation Academy was our first choice for getting the airline career underway. I ultimately decided that’s what I wanted to do and in August of 1992, I moved to Sanford, Florida and started from scratch at Comair Aviation Academy having never flown an airplane before (save 5 minutes at the controls on our tour at Shields).
I’ll cover the details of the rest of the career in each of the following sections. Here’s an overview of what happened. I started at Comair Aviation Academy as a student in August of 1992 and finished with my Commercial SEL/MEL/Instrument and CFI/CFII/MEI in May of 1993. The Academy didn’t hire flight instructors for a while so I worked there as a dispatcher in the mean time. I was a flight instructor at Comair Aviation Academy from April, 1994 through September, 1995. Comair Airlines didn’t hire for a while so I didn’t start ground school until March, 1996 and was hired in April, 1996 (I’ll explain why in the Comair Airlines section). I was a pilot for Comair Airlines from April, 1996 through December 2000. I went to work for World Airways in January 2001 as a pilot and am still working there.
Tom Risch’s Story
As a child in Dayton, Ohio I remember my dad, an Army Corp veteran of WWII, taking me to a spot outside Wright Patterson AFB where we could watch the planes take off and land.
Growing up just east of Celina, Ohio I remember watching the vapor trails of the jets and watching and listening to the round engine airplanes flying over.
Most of these were military aircraft and my small boys imagination took me to exciting places.
In 1968 I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and was trained as an aircraft mechanic at Wichita Falls, Texas, recips over two engines. Crawling all over KC-97 was like going to Disneyland. I was then stationed at Charleston AFB, SC on C-124’s. I crewed the last C-124 Charleston had and cheered as it shook it’s way off the ground heading for an ANG base. What an airplane! When standing out in front with head sets on for an engine run up you had to pick a spot where the vibrations from those #4 engine while in fight was an experience to remember.
From there I was sent TDY to Eglin AFB, FI. To be cross trained to single engine recips. Specifically, the A1 Skyraider, but also got up close and personal with the T-28. I was issued orders for NKP, Thailand, expecting to be crewing a Sandy. Upon arrival I was told I was attached to Crash Recovery/Aero Repair. I spent 367 days inside and outside A1’s, A-26’s, C-47’s, C-123’s CH-53’s, HH-53’s, O-1’s, O-2’s and even had the opportunity to work on the occasional OV-10 and F-4C. I got as close to the C-123, C-119 and C-130 gunships that slipped in and out, as I could, lot’s of security! I also was in and out of Laos, the Plain of Jars (Plaine des Jarres) and many Air America Lima Sites. We would recover the A1 when it bellied in, get the gear down, hook it up to a flying crane and carry it to a Lima site where we would put it back together so it could be flown back to NKP. Sometimes, unfortunately, we brought back in pieces. A very special time of my life.
After NKP, it was back to the good ol’ USA, Travis AFB, Ca. I was again cross trained! This time jets over two. I was assigned to C-141 configuration. I spent my last 18 months in the USAF inside the 141 and watching the “new”, “amazing”, C5A Galaxy lumber in and out of Travis.
For the past 18 years I have been the Mercer County Veterans Service Officer here in Ohio. My job is to obtain VA benefits, from medical care to compensation, for my country veterans. Through the years I have put together a large collection of “trench art” and 36 military aircraft models. 26 of these are from your company. I have found that you offer the best quality, packing, prices and fastest shipping available. When you order a new model and know you will have it in a few days as opposed to a few weeks you guys can’t be beat. Friendly people and good service works! When a veteran walks into my office and stops mid way and mid sentence and stares at my planes I know we will have a conversation that starts with “I remember that plane”. My collection has been an invaluable source of history lessons for me. The WWII vet who recalls those beautiful fighters and bombers, the source of history lessons for me. The WWII vet who recalls those beautiful fighters and bombers, the Korean and Vietnam vet who relates the welcome site and sound of the air support. The tears and the memories, priceless!
My collection has been shown on the front page of our local newspaper and provided “tours” for many children and veteran. The pleasure I get is immeasurable. There are still many more that I will eventually add to my collection. Thanks for being there!