Anything worth doing, is worth doing poorly at first
I am still starting my career as a pilot. With low hours in the pilot seat and a high passion for flight, I want to learn as much as I can to be the best, safest pilot I can be. My goal is to become an instructor and help others find the passion that I did.
With this goal in mind, I plan to document my experience while putting everything I learned and continue to learn in one place. To be a one stop resource for myself, other pilots and eventually one day my students.
As the first line states, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly. There were so many people that have been credited with this phrase that I don’t really know who to actually give credit to. If you know, please let me know so I can reference it properly.
Now, no one in aviation wants to be poor or bad at anything. There is so much at stake if you do it wrong. However, as with any skill, you start from nothing. In aviation, that’s why we go up with instructors for the first 20-30 hours of flight time. Because you don’t natively know how to land a plane; or take-off for that matter. You don’t know that crossing the controls can cause a hazardous situation. In fact, you don’t know what you don’t know. And that could really hurt you. So we go up with an instructor and we learn.
Once we have the basics down and we have recieved all the flight training required and have passed the written and practical we are pilots. But we’re not good pilots. We are like the 16 year old who just got their driver’s license. We know the rules and have the knowledge, but we don’t have the experience to make us good.
Mistakes are made:
- We porpoise our landings or touch nose wheel first
- Weave the center line while taxiing
- We takeoff on the left side of the runway because we didn’t put in enough right rudder
But we still fly. We still continue to improve our basic skills. We get better with every flight and build on the confidence that we do know what we are doing.
As I build my experience and get better with every takeoff, flight and landing that I do, I want to share my knowledge and give the no BS state of my flying. So, without further ado, here is where I currently stand:
- 118 total hours
- 72 hours in a Piper Cherokee 140
- 46 hours in a Cessna 172
- 52 hours PIC
- Ratings in progress: Instrument, High Performance
- Next classes: Mountain Flying
- Next checkout: Piper Arrow
I’d love to tell you that I want to fly once a week as a realistic goal, but I’m probably more likely to fly every other week. So as long as I can start working in more cross countries I should be well on my way to my flight goals.
Let me know what your thoughts are. Should I change my projected ratings? Is there a better track to reaching my end goal that doesn’t involve craming time in or generating additional hours in the day?
