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Here we are again, Journal. You and me, it's been such a long while. But I have things to tell you, and thus we return to this place.
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I've been working as a flight instructor for six months and change now. It's a bizarre job, in a lot of ways. Firstly, the pay is ludicrously inconsistent. My hourly rate is nothing to sneeze at, for sure, but I average around 65 paid hours per month. This, of course, does not include all the time I spend simply sitting around the office waiting for customers to walk in the door. In a lot of ways, this is how the aviation business works at-large. Senior airline pilots do indeed have ludicrous hourly wages, but they're limited to 100 paid hours per month and 1000 per year. And the paid hours? Only from the close of the cabin door prior to departure until when it opens after arrival. All the time sitting around airports, away from home in hotel rooms and otherwise doing things that could generally be considered work? Unpaid. There are also salaried positions in this industry, but in terms of pay and hours "worked" versus away-from-home they are fundamentally similar. In less verbose terms, I have my own little microcosm of the industry, in general.
I still find it odd to think of myself as an educator, despite the parts of my job title and certificates which include the word, "Instructor." I rarely find myself in a classroom and much of the "ground" work I do is one-on-one. The majority of my job is done in small planes, which are hardly interchangeable with 30'x 30' rooms filled with desks. But what I do is really no different. It's my job to impart skill and knowledge upon people, and to supervise them while they gain some real world experience. Flight training, I guess, is part internship in that regard. The one truly notable difference in my job as an educator is that, especially in early lessons, my students would literally be killing themselves were I not there. Granted, I'm sure first graders are entirely capable of killing themselves if left unsupervised in a classroom, but it's not a foregone conclusion.
One of the hardest decisions I have to make on a daily basis with my students is when to intervene. Generally, I want these pilots-to-be to see and feel the consequences of their actions; trial-and-error is actually a good way to get a feel for flying. My job is to make sure those consequences are informative without being dangerous. The question is always when to step in. The closer a situation gets to dangerous, the better an example of what can go wrong it is, but it takes knowledge of the situation, the aircraft involved and the student to know where that line is on any given day. Only a couple times have I erred on the wrong side of that equation.
What can be truly scary is when students do the completely unexpected. The other day I was flying with a student who is, generally, pretty good at landing the aircraft. It was our last landing of the day and the winds were light, though I had noticed them beginning to shear back-and-forth between a headwind and a crosswind. The student's approach was excellent and the landing was looking to be a real greaser but then, about ten feet above the ground, the wind changed direction and rather than kicking in some rudder and keeping the wings level, my student inexplicably pitched up and banked away from the wind, thereby getting us dangerously slow while exposing a large surface to the wind to push us away from the runway towards the ditch. So I had to intervene lest we stall and crash next to the pavement. I wasn't expecting it in the slightest, but thank goodness I had been keeping an eye on the wind and was aware of the situation.
Once we've taxied back and shut down, I then have to talk to the student about the landing, critiquing what went wrong without crushing his confidence or freaking him out more than he already is.
Honestly, my greatest assets as a flight instructor are my even disposition and laid-back attitude. Already I've had a handful of students come to me after working with other instructors and tell me how refreshing it is to fly with someone who will let them fly the plane and isn't always on edge. That latter part... maybe I just hide it well. It's really bizarre to be thought of as personable, though.
Back at my old job I was infamously unapproachable. Not that I wasn't a nice or helpful guy--I was, in fact, probably the nicest person in my department--but my general disdain for, well, everything, hid it quite well. People came to me last with their problems, which was a true blessing.
I guess it's because--and here we come full-circle--I'm an educator now. My casually annoyed, can't-be-bothered persona just won't cut it in that capacity. I suppose it shouldn't be that surprising. I was disturbingly well-liked back when I was camp counseling and I've always been an effective teacher. But it's a different side of me, and it's weird to be displaying it so regularly.
Whatever happened to nice on the inside, grumpy and snarky on the outside?
Still, I don't know how much longer I'll be doing this. I'm about two-thirds of the way to where I need to be, experience-wise, to get a job as a regional airline or freight pilot. The economy has more than a little to say about when that transition will be possible, however. Maybe I'll be instructing for couple more years, or maybe I'll be done with it this summer. I really don't know at this point.
Either way, I will be trying to relocate back to the West Coast come summer. If all goes well, Jackie will be leading that charge and I'll do my best to follow her geographically but, that notwithstanding, I miss having both mountains and green.
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