Flying Lessons

When I learned to fly, back in the dark ages of 1991 when airspace was still classified as ARSAs and TRSAs, we didn't use RNAV, GPS, or even headsets. In fact, when I think about it, it's rather a miracle that I learned to fly at all. My instructor, Jim Harrigan, was British, and not from London, either. He was from the sticks and it showed in his accent that I struggled to understand as he shouted at me through a cloud of Marlborough smoke over the engine noise of the 1978 Piper Warrior.

This was a lark for me, something I decided to try after a couple months of regular skydiving and when I won a last-minute scholarship that covered my final semester of college, freeing up the cash I had saved over the summer to pay for school. My coach learned of the skydiving (I was on the cross country team) and threatened to revoke my running scholarship if I didn't quit jumping out of airplanes tout de suite. So I signed up for my first lesson. It seemed like something I could basically treat as an extra class, so I purchased the student pilot kit complete with textbooks and plunked down my cold hard cash for a pre-paid Private Pilot program.

Next thing I knew, Smokey Jim was climbing out of the airplane while the engine was still running. I looked at him curiously and asked, "Where are you going?" I couldn't understand what he said, but he made some hand motions that appeared to indicate his desire for me to make three touch-and-goes. By myself??

Jim abandoned me in early December to go back to the British sticks for Christmas, leaving me in the capable (and much more understandable) hands of a female instructor named Kim. She was somehow under the impression that I was nearly ready for my check ride. Hindsight suggests this was due in part to the "pre-paid" aspect of my program, meaning if I required more hours of instruction than allotted, the school didn't get any more money.

The day after I graduated college, Kim and I were enroute from KRMG to KGAD, where I had precisely 40 hours (the bare minimum required) of flight time under my belt when we landed. Kim introduced me to the examiner who would administer my test then threw me to the wolves. That night with a fresh license in my pocket, I boarded a plane to Montana, gazing in awe at the pilots, wondering if some day I could be like them.