Is Flying a Vocation or Avocation?

But music was his life, it was not his livelihood,

And it made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good.

And he sang from his heart and he sang from his soul.

He did not know how well he sang; It just made him whole.

  “Mr. Tanner” by Harry Chapin

Do you fly for love or for a living? I have done both, but usually write about my decades-long piloting and instructing career as if that is the epitome of what it means to be an aviator. You have probably noticed that my proclivity to write articles and columns about professional flying is a very common thing in aviation media. People like a good professional flying article.

This is a problem because piloting an aircraft is so much more than making money while securing health insurance and a retirement fund. While it may be true that you are vitally interested in me describing what it is like to fly a Boeing 777 down to minimums in London, it is also true that reading about the procedure does not show the love I experienced in spending my life preparing to do that approach. 

My love of flying and has been expressed over the years through being a professional pilot, but I have also articulated it via fly-ins, taking the kids for a ride, and spending days in my hangar waxing my wings or just noodling around. One method is not better than the other and this is a hard fact that may be holding some people back from enjoying aviation as much as they could. 

Plane Envy

“Happiness is where we find it, but very rarely where we seek it.” 

 J. Petit Senn

There are so many different kinds and types of airplanes when I started my career and I wanted to fly them all. I missed my chance at flying fighters in the military but other than that I have flown or flown in everything I wanted to with the exception of spacecraft. 

The quest to fly all of those aircraft was not an easy one and it came with the burden of being too anxious and greedy. When I was flying forestry in a single-engine utility aircraft, I was constantly eying and dreaming about flying a heavier twin. Reciprocal engine aircraft were great, but turboprops and turbojets looked really cool and I could not wait to fly them. 

This led to a sort of burn-out when I finally got to the major airlines at the ripe old age of twenty-three. I had been hustling my entire flying life and now hustle did not matter. I had to wait for the long process of gaining seniority to unfold before I could move up into other aircraft and jobs. You can’t move up from co-pilot to captain unless you have the seniority to hold it and you can’t move up from a Boeing 727 to a 777 if you aren’t senior enough.

I had to learn to relax and I never quite got the knack for relaxation. This meant that I spent way too much time yearning for the next airplane with no way of achieving it except by waiting and did not spend enough time enjoying where I was. 

The five years I spent as a flight engineer seemed then to be an eternity of waiting for the right and then left seat of that airliner. 

I had quite a bit of fun as an engineer, but I don’t think I really appreciated and fully enjoyed where I was. Now that I am old enough to have escaped the prison of high expectations, I think I would really enjoy sitting back in my seat with my leg slung over the engineer’s table sipping on some coffee while I listen to the other two pilots tell their war stories. 

An Airplane is an Airplane

Here is something I have learned about professional piloting and I apologize if it sounds cynical. It does not matter what you are flying. What matters is the kind of money you can make while flying it.

I could be just as happy flying a Cessna 152 (Piper Cherokee 140) as a Boeing 767 if the pay was the same. Both aircraft are great to fly but the real reason that professional pilots want to fly the bigger ones is that they pay more. In other words, an airplane is an airplane.”

The skills needed to land in a stiff crosswind are the same for both aircraft. Their basic structure and the way they work are also very similar. The pilot flying the 767 is not better than the one flying the 150 (140). They just have different pay grades and passenger loads. Some days I spent flying charters in single-engine aircraft were much more demanding than ones spent jetting to Europe. 

Professional flying is about making money and a living as a pilot. You can love it as I do but the fact remains that there are tough days when a flying job really is a job and it is hard to feel the “love.” 

You don’t have to be Rodin to sculpt or Lady Ga Ga to sing

The focus for most may be on the professional side of flying but the non-professional, avocational side of it is much larger and more interesting. Many more people fly for the fun of it than do for the paycheck they might get from it. There are many examples, but here are a few I have seen:

Smokey was the name of a guy at the first ramp I ever tramped in Lakeland Florida. I never got to know him very well, but his avocation was home-building and flying gyrocopters.

You may remember that many years ago you could order a gyrocopter kit from the Sears catalog. Smokey thought that was cheating. He designed and built his own flying machines in his garage and then brought them out to the airport. Some had engines but most had to be towed by a pick-up truck to achieve flight. This pimply line boy got to be the tow truck driver on more than one occasion.

His gyrocopters were the only aircraft that I had absolutely no desire to go flying in. They were scary. Still, he loved them. He did not want to make money making or flying his gyros. He just loved them.

I have a warbird buddy who lets me fly along with him from time to time. He has never made a penny flying airplanes, yet he is one of the best pilots I know. You could learn a lot from this guy – I know I have. He has no desire to enter his plane in contests or to show it off in any way. We don’t even to aerobatics in it. He just loves working on it and flying it on perfect weather days.

Finally, there is an aged and retired doctor at our airport. I see him and his wife almost every day. He is long past being able to fly, but he is out there sitting on the seat of his walker watching the traffic pattern almost every afternoon. He never worked as an aviation professional. He was a doctor, but you won’t find him hanging around the clinic. He is at the airport because he has had a life-long love of aviation.

There is a tendency for us to look up into the sky at the latest gee-whiz airplane and wish we were flying it for a living, but you can and should love flying what you are where you are. It took me a long time to get here, but to paraphrase Harry Chapin, a man who always wanted to be a pilot: 

Flying is my life – it is not my livelihood

And it makes me feel so happy

It makes me feel so good

And I fly with my heart

And I fly with my soul

I do not know how well I fly

It just makes me whole.  

This article is from Cessna Flyer and Piper Flyer Magazines Join today at:

https://www.cessnaflyer.org

https://www.piperflyer.org