If you can draw, you may have a path to funds for flight training. Kasey Dixon grows her flight training fund by taking advantage of an industry created by the Internet—made-to-order drawings of your aircraft. It allows her to work at home while finishing an online aeronautics degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and, when she has an hour free, to create a drawing for a customer.
Dixon is one of many vendors on fiverr that offer just about anything you want for $5. While that’s a great price for the customer, it takes her an hour to do each drawing and means she’s below minimum wage. Still, the flying piggy bank grows and, best of all, she gets to talk to pilots.
Dixon, who worked on Apache helicopters while in the U.S. Army and is married to an Army pilot, calculates it takes 45 drawings before she can head to the airport for an hour of training for her instrument rating. The San Antonio native became a private pilot at Texas State Technical College, but hopes that she will be in a commercial pilot job in not too many years.
Here’s how her home business works:
You send a photo of your aircraft to Dixon through the fiverr website. She is a free-hand artist and can trace the photo onto an iPad with her finger using the Sketchbook Express app for artists, then add color in Corel PaintShop Pro. She then sketches in a sky and completes the aircraft portrait.
Just for good measure, you should know she is also a trained classical cellist, and that was the first outlet for her artistic expression. While still a child, she rode on commercial airline flights calling out the cloud types to mostly uninterested fellow passengers and an embarrassed mother, and once drew an airliner for an American Airlines pilot. She remains embarrassed to this day that she drew a perfect Delta logo on the airplane.
So where did her passion for flight come from? Listen up (or read up in this case) Commemorative Air Force officials: You get the credit for this one. When she was a child there were tons of airshows in the San Antonio area. At one airshow she saw a Commemorative Air Force P-40 painted to represent the aircraft flown by legendary ace and Flying Tiger David Lee “Tex” Hill. The sight of that Flying Tiger fighter, and especially the shark’s teeth on the nose—that’s all it took.
“Flying has been my lifelong dream,” she said.
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