Piloting career regrets?

[Stifler's Mom]

Suppose you enjoy sex and it fulfills you...?

Be a porno star then...I just hope you are hung like a horse, and not a horse-fly.

 

[huncowboy]

Your doc was Dr. McCauley and his son Mike.

You got the T-shirt. It was him. I was sure someone was going to figure it out. Good old guy by the way. I will keep using his service until I am out of FL.

He kept asking me who is on the dollar bill, next who is on the twenty etc... and I could not figure any of them out. I probably ended up in his “dumb European immigrant” folder. I told him like three times that I am a foreigner LOL plus I never ever carry cash on me anyways. But he did not give me a break. He was quizzing the whole office plus a vendor who was trying to sell some medical supplies. She did not know it either LOL. This and the story about not becoming a doc took like 50% of the total time spent on me of this whole 1st class examination. Still I was out in 30 min. Normally in FL you don't even get into an examination room within 45 min if you have an appointment. Kudos to Doc McCauley just for that!!!

 

[Typhoon1244]

Be a porno star then...I just hope you are hung like a horse, and not a horse-fly.

Uh, let's leave me out of this...

 

[avbug]

A few years ago I looked up registries of airplanes I've flown, and something like half of them have been destroyed. I sat down and began to add up lists of friends, co-workers, and associates I've know who have been killed in airplanes, and stopped when I the numbers became too many to dwell on. I've flown from cold muddy scratches in the ground, been baked in cockpits so hot I couldn't hardly see for all the sweat, for months on end. I've had fires, structural failures, hydraulic failures, explosions on board, a right-seat rider with a heart attack, pneumatic failures, gear failures, control failures, instrument failures, electrical losses, failures, and fires, and a host of other experiences over the years.

No man lives who has enough cash to buy those experiences, nor could I trade them if such a person might exist. They're mine, and I value them for what I have learned about my craft, and most of all, about myself.

I have watched pilots die. I have put out burning airplanes. I have sifted through my priorities as I struggled for memory in intensive care following a parachute failure and an impact with a very unforgiving cliff. This past year I watched over and over the death of five more associates and co-workers whom I knew, with whom I'd flown, in airplanes I'd flown and knew well. Five more names added to a long silent list.

I've been separated from my kids for ten months at a stretch, denied the chance to see them learning to walk or talk. I've lived out of airplanes, lived in hangars, slept underwings and in cockpits. I've gone years with unending cuts on my fingers and hands and arms from safety wire and aluminum, burns on my knuckles from hot exhausts and bleed ducts, working on airplanes. I have fond memories of being eaten alive by mosquitoes during all night cylinder changing sessions, or of standing frozen on a tall ladder, lashed to an engine in 40 knot winds in freezing climates while trying to be meticulous about every detail on that engine.

I've seen the underside of powerlines as I slid under them, unable to go over (or unwilling to take the risk), and the topside of thunderstorms that hurled about more power than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I've been knocked unconsious in an airplane, burned by one, run over by another. One hand doesn't move the same as the other after being broken and cut in an engine compartment at a time and place when medical help wasn't in the cards. My hearing has adapted to it's environment, it isn't the same as it was. Too much loud noise, too much vibration.

I've been sick in chemical as it's been sprayed on crops, sick in MEK while working on an airplane. Sick from fever while turning wrenches in the dead of winter on a job that just had to get out...miserable for the condition, but grateful for the work.

Any regrets? None, yet. Only that one day it will end.

Pick your poison.

 

[GLSoar]

Career

As Richard Geer once said: " I got no place else to go"

 

[Weasil]

AVBUG

No man lives who has enough cash to buy those experiences,

Wanna bet?
Man, you really are full of yourself. You claim to have flown ALL aircraft and have ALL ratings possible. So when did you fly the
X-1? I would love to hear about that sometime. How about the wright flyer? How is Orville doing anyway.

 

[88_MALIBU]

Get a good paying job and buy your own airplane, then you'll really look forward to the drive to the airport.

 

[msw]

Go to Med School. Now, at age 50, I realize how much smarter my parents and my grandparents were when they told me almost 30 years ago to go to Med School. My grandfather even offerred to pay for my Med School. And my college grades were good enough that I could have got in.

But, no, after 4 years of college, I was smarter than my parents and grandparents, tired of school and just wanted to fly airplanes and chase girls. I still do the former; my wife objects to the latter.

And I realize that if I'd gone to Med School, I'd be owning my own King Air or Citation now, instead of the Cherokee.

Go to Med School.

 

[Typhoon1244]

Avbug...man, you really are full of yourself.

Yeah...but the rest of us are full of ourselves too, so it evens out.

Avbug ain't the smartest guy around, but he's got more meaningful flying experience than an awful lot of us put together. You should listen to him.

 

[Vladimir Lenin]

Avbug ain't the smartest guy around, but he's got more meaningful flying experience than an awful lot of us put together. You should listen to him.

I still think he Googles most of the responses

a good composer maybe, but not someone who actively flies