When I was a kid, I had my life was mapped out at the age of eight years old.
First, I thought I would join the military, become a fighter pilot, score thirty kills, and earn the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Next would come my astronaut phase, during which I would invent the phaser, make love to green alien women, and have a best friend who happened to be a Vulcan.
After conquering space, it would be time to become a rich airline pilot who soared through the skies and visited interesting parts of the world while being paid an enormous amount of money.
I also wanted to be an artist, and I desired this career track because one day, at the Polk Theatre in downtown Lakeland, Florida, I saw the movie The Ugly Daschhound, starring Dean Jones, Suzanne Pleshette, and a lot of dogs.
In that movie, Dean was a stay-at-home artist, and Suzanne played his adoring (and I mean adoring) stay-at-home wife who doted over him and let him paint in peace while she did all of the work in between almost hourly episodes of trying to make out with him. It did not hurt that her character name was Fran Garrison, meaning she would not have to change her last name when she married me.
It was 1966, I was eleven, and dammit, that movie convinced me to shoehorn a career as a stay-at-home artist into my life plan. A few years later, in eighth-grade art class, I modified my plans from “artist” to “writer” after realizing I could not draw anything except airplanes, specifically Spitfires.
How did it turn out? Well, I learned that I wasn’t meant for the military. I could not march well and did not like people giving me orders. My lack of military experience and my claustrophobic nature stymied my dream of becoming an astronaut.
I worked my way into the airline world and eke out a fairly nice living flying jets all over the world, although I had way more Shreveport and Newark airport layovers than Nice, France, or London, England.
I married the love of my life, who did not mind changing her name to mine, and that is all the detail I will go into on that subject except to say that we have had a lot of dogs. I work from home now, writing aviation stuff along with comedy and satire. I am having fun doing it, which is nice, because the pay sucks.
The reason I bring up my young life plans is to have a short chat with the young aviators and aviator wannabees out there who have their life plans nailed down. I suggest you pry those nails up and open your mind a little bit.
A year or so ago, I was thrust into teaching at a local aviation college. Like the military, it did not work out for me, but while I was there, I was dumbstruck by the lack of ambition and adventure that the young people displayed when I asked them what they wanted to do with their lives.
A majority of them were there to get “airline jobs.” They postulated that they would be major airline captains in two or three years after graduation, and if it wasn’t for the 1500-hour rule, they could go to the left seat even faster.
They were banking on the pilot shortage-driven hiring boom to sweep them up into long subsonic flights worldwide while they raked in tons of moola and stared at their iPads. None of them mentioned any adventure or quest to do something exciting.
Their lives, as they planned them, were to spend four years at an aviation college getting a degree that the airlines no longer required while flying under constant supervision and then transition to a long career of flying straight and level on autopilot, supervised by another group of managers.
That was their dream, and it made me think about my life plan and how it worked out in some ways but not in others.
I look back on my life and wish I had been a better marcher, order taker, and ROTC cadet. I wish I had not needed drugs to climb into an MRI machine and had become an astronaut. And, heavens to Betsy, I wish I had a talent for drawing pictures with charcoal and paint instead of words. All of that would have been nice.
I am glad, though, that I managed to jump at some adventures. I did not know I was going to be an airline pilot until I was one. I was too busy towing banners, flying forestry, instructing, chartering, corporate flying, and generally having the adventurous life as a young pilot.
My advice to young people who want to be instantly senior and set in their careers is to forget all about that stuff. It is almost impossible to control your destiny, and it wastes precious time. You could be flying upside down or seeding clouds in Saharan Africa instead of writing angry letters about how unfair the rules are.
Find what makes you eager to get up in the morning. Embrace the suck of those flying jobs that make you sweat, and leave you with a headache, but make you smile when you feel the adventure of it.
It is okay with me if you only want to fly copilot eighty hours a month without ever having an adventure or a deep dive into what you really want to do. That is how many, possibly most, pilots live their lives. I just want to remind you that there is a world of adventure, fun, and fantastic, doting life partners out there to enjoy if you don’t lock them out of your dreams.
