Someone in one of the forums I participate in posted a rant about the verbal abuse they suffer simply for being a low-hour pilot - about unsafe they are, and so on, just based on logged hours.
Then someone responded with:
Many of us older pilots have developed habits over the years that keep us out of trouble, we know what we can get away with, and what we can't. we seldom go any place we haven't been many times before in aircraft that we don't have a lot of time in.
I wanted to share my reply with you. Here it is:
That.
I am a new pilot - three weeks, and my logbook has a total of what, 76 hours in it? I'm 39 and did it for recreation, 1-2 times a week over 6 months. I don't have much time to fly, but I enjoy every moment I do.
Here is the thing in the post above: pretty much
everywhere I go is a place I haven't been to one time, let alone many. Sure, my home airport, and the one in the practice area, I know pretty well. The one random strip 100m away where I ended my XC trips during training is next - been there 3 times. There are maybe a half dozen more where I have landed once. That's it.
So everything is new. But at the same time, because it is like that, I do believe I tend to spend a lot more time figuring out where I'm going, what challenges lie along the way, and what particular issues I might encounter over there, before I set foot outside my front door to go to the airport. Hopefully, that mitigates the lack of experience.
I have done something stupid pretty much every flight since passing my checkride (heck, I did something pretty gosh darn stupid DURING my checkride, but the examiner liked everything else well enough that he was satisfied with shouting at me for about 30 seconds when I did it). I write about them in forums because it helps me both get feedback but also the process of writing "firms up" the experience in my mind so that I don't forget it. And I do notice the improvements; I don't tend to make the same mistake twice. I just find new ones to make!
Flying is such a thrill, but also such a challenge. There are no safety guards, like they have on cars (airbags, lane change warnings, auto-distance-keeping-braking-sensors, and a gadzillion other doodahs). There is something amazingly special about aviation, for me, which is that it is still, somehow, an area where personal accountability well and truly matters - and in the most basic sense:
It's up to me to stay alive. Period. That's what makes it so different than any other risky endeavor I can choose to undertake. I don't know if and how long it can stay that way. But dear god, if all it takes is for me to suffer some verbal abuse from arrogant a-holes just for my well-established lack of experience to keep it that way... bring it on. Bring it on.
