Continuing Ed

Find Your Place In The Sky

As a profession, flying has a lot in common with teaching. Both require rigorous, formal training to acquire the necessary skills and government certification to put those skills into income-producing practice. Continuing and advanced education and certification opportunities also are common to teaching and flying careers. And, both professions are in need of new practitioners - the demand side is running ahead of the supply side.

One other interesting characteristic shared by teaching and flying is that both attract late-blooming dreamers. These are the people who, for whatever reason, originally chose another line of work but still have stars in their eyes and a fire in their bellies to teach or fly. No matter how strongly they try to suppress it, they'll always be blessed - some might say cursed - with an insatiable desire to pursue their dream. We've all heard stories of successful people who leave their high-paying, jet-setting professions for the comparatively low salary of a teacher. Most explain it by saying that after a lifetime of acquiring knowledge, skills, titles, status, and money, they simply want to "give something back" to society. The truth is, they've always been drawn to the notion of teaching, of awakening a love of learning in others. Once they attain financial security - or grow too frustrated with the corporate world - they make the decision to follow their dreams.

Aviation is attracting its share of these late-blooming-dreamer types. Last fall I visited Comair Academy, an intensive, fulltime pilot training school that takes nonpilots and, in about a year, turns them into cockpit-credentialed recruits for Comair, the Delta-owned regional carrier. The class included a 50-year-old man who had shucked his regular career to become an airline pilot. He was willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to earn the minimum qualifications for a job that would last no more than 10 years. Now that's someone in hot pursuit of a dream.

His story is not unique. A corporate-owned Cessna 414 at my home airport is flown by a man who until recently worked at an automotive service center, but gave it up to fly for a living. Airlines, corporate flight departments, charter operators, flight schools - they're all hiring converts.

There are plenty more of you out there who would love to do the same thing. And why shouldn't you? The challenge of mastering a complex machine in a dynamic environment; the satisfaction of delivering your passengers in perfect safety in almost any weather conditions; and the excitement of traveling to new destinations - all experienced daily. Sure sounds like it beats most anything done in an office.

The good news is the opportunities are just beginning to flower for late bloomers, thanks to the coming boom in aviation. Here's what's happening:

United Airlines has announced that it is throwing its hat into the hottest new ring in business aviation - fractional ownership programs. With fractional ownership, an airplane is purchased by two to eight buyers but managed and crewed by a professional operating company. All the owner has to do is call the management company to say they need to be on their way to New York in two hours.

Fractional ownership is in its infancy, but already the major players have launched several hundred airplanes with hundreds more on order. United's entry is clear evidence that fractional ownership is here to stay in a big way.

United has said that in five years it expects to have 1,000 pilots flying some 200 fractionally-owned airplanes, and there's plenty of speculation that the other major airlines will follow United's lead. One executive of a large fractional operator said that only 2 percent of the market has been reached thus far. That means thousands more airplanes being flown by thousands more pilots. Dreamer, are you beginning to get my point?

There's more. Some people believe we are on the verge of a new age of aviation, one that will see many, many more people flying small, sophisticated turbine-powered airplanes to airports all over the country. Ironically, the stimulus for this growth is the airlines themselves. Their hub and spoke system; their fare structures; crowded airplanes; and uneven service have frequent fliers crying for relief.

Some will find it in the airlines' fractional programs. Others will gravitate to a new generation of small, high-performance, relatively inexpensive turbine-powered aircraft. The poster child for this new generation is the Eclipse, a twin-engine jet currently under development. With an operating ceiling of 41,000 feet, cruise speeds in the 350-knot range, and a price of less than $1 million (for the first batch, anyway), the Eclipse holds the promise of extending the efficiency and convenience of business jet aviation to many more companies and individuals than now participate.

And who will fly this new crop of microjets? If these aircraft proliferate - to the point of enabling a new low-cost air transportation service that will be the equivalent of flying taxicabs - then the demand for qualified pilots will skyrocket.

The FAA, the airlines, and professional business aviation pilots are beginning to express concerns about legions of inexperienced microjet owner-pilots mixing it up with the bigger iron in the flight levels. That creates an opportunity for an experienced, motivated nonprofessional general aviation pilot to begin flying for a living. What that person lacks in turbine experience may be compensated for by a background in cross-country instrument flying to diverse destinations. Solid basic flying skills and a professional approach are the essential building blocks to constructing a second-career r�sum�.

One esoteric but important quality that late-blooming dreamers bring to the table is the perspective they've acquired. Flying as a professional business aviator is as much about customer service as it is about cockpit or crew resource management. Unlike airline pilots, business aviation pros deal face-to-face with their customers on every flight. Business aviation is a customer service business that just happens to provide transportation. Those who have spent their first careers working effectively with customers have a valuable skill set to offer. "Diverse backgrounds do appeal to us," agrees Dan Smith, the pilot hiring coordinator for CitationShares, a new fractional operator launched as a joint venture between Cessna Aircraft Company and TAG Aviation, an international aircraft management and charter company.

Eclipse Aviation is aiming for certification in 2003. If it is successful, other microjet manufacturers will follow. By then, fractional operators may well be fielding a fleet of turboprops and business jets larger than the fleet operated by the airlines. Late bloomers, are you ready for the rush?