How many of you guys are real life pilots?

[RichieFly 750]

2 hours ago, Ajb376 said:

... I own a baron 58 in real life ...

Take me with you. I'll help with the gas money. 😉

But, yeah. It takes time, dedication and money.

I would suggest taking what they used to call a discovery flight. In this, you go up with a instructor and he lets you 'fly' a bit depending on your aptitude. I think you'll know before you're back on the ground if flying is for you. Not everyone is cut out to be a juggler, surgeon or thief. Find out if you have the stuff and proceed from there.

[PIC007 82]

2 hours ago, sd_flyer said:

Yes. But I had a student who transitioned from sport to private and it ended up to be more expensive.  Sport pilot make sense if person have health issues frankly

Without knowing the OP's situation, just throwing out options he may not be aware of. If he is interested and able, I would also suggest a 'Part 141' school, as the hour requirements are less. Also train on a plane with analog gauges first, it's cheaper and a lot of schools are charging more for glass.

[Ajb376 59]

28 minutes ago, RichieFly said:

Take me with you. I'll help with the gas money. 😉

But, yeah. It takes time, dedication and money.

I would suggest taking what they used to call a discovery flight. In this, you go up with a instructor and he lets you 'fly' a bit depending on your aptitude. I think you'll know before you're back on the ground if flying is for you. Not everyone is cut out to be a juggler, surgeon or thief. Find out if you have the stuff and proceed from there.

If you’re ever in the Philadelphia area...sure. 

[sd_flyer 6,119]

38 minutes ago, PIC007 said:

Without knowing the OP's situation, just throwing out options he may not be aware of. If he is interested and able, I would also suggest a 'Part 141' school, as the hour requirements are less. Also train on a plane with analog gauges first, it's cheaper and a lot of schools are charging more for glass.

When did my commercial I did both part 61 and part 141. I ended up paying about  the same. Sure 141 seemed faster, but really  passing all stage checks didn't make it faster.

[Chock 17,769]

If you want to fly and don't have a lot of cash (or time), here's a simple solution:

Have a look at a gliding club website, see if they do a trial lesson, take one of these (it will be cheap) and see if it floats your boat. If you find that it does (it will, trust me) perhaps join up and then you can rent a club glider for not much and have a club member with an instructor rating take you up for lessons. Many of them will do this for free because they are after getting their hours up, so it really does not cost a lot to fly regularly. Many gliding clubs will let you do a four day residential course where by the end of that time, if you have an aptitude for it, they will send you solo, which means you'll qualify for your FAI glider pilot's licence, and you can do that for well under a grand.

Most gliders are stressed for +4 and -2Gs at least, so they are fairly aerobatic, can perform spins, loops and such, and flying one will make you a very good pilot for not much money, because it is up to your skill how long you can stay airborne, so you either get good, or you end up landing in a field lol. You only pay a small rate per hour for a glider and the cost of the launch, after that, there are no other costs for fuel or anything like that. so it is if not exactly dirt cheap, then certainly within the reach of most people with a job and a few quid to spare each weekend. You can easily fly pretty much all day for less than a hundred quid in a rented glider.

One of the fun challenges with that, is that you will have to learn how to get a landing right first time every time, because unlike with a powered aeroplane, there is no opening up the throttle to go around if your approach looks bad. So you will, of necessity, get really good at setting up and carrying out a circuit and a decent landing.

Don't imagine it's all serene floating around either, a winch launch is a very exciting thing, an aerotow launch means you have to perfect formation flying and most gliders will come in at pretty much the same landing speed as your average single engine GA aeroplane. You might also like to know that if you get the nose down, most gliders can go faster than a typical powered GA single engined aeroplane too, for example, the first glider I ever soloed in was a two seater Polish SZD 50-3 Puchacz, which being a twin seat trainer built to be robust rather than fast, is not an especially fast glider, but even that had a Vne of 134 knots, which is about ten knots faster than a Cessna 152 can manage at full throttle. Those Puchacz trainers are stressed for +5.3 and -2.65G, so you can really chuck them around the sky as well if you like, pulling ninety degree banked turns, spinning them from an entry altitude below two thousand feet and all that kind of fun malarkey, and you don't get to do that in a Cessna too often.

You might like to note that two of the best and most celebrated pilots in recent years who managed to save their stricken airliners, were both experienced glider pilots who used their skills in this discipline to save their aeroplanes and everyone on board - that would be Chesley Sullenberger who landed his A320 on the Hudson after it lost both engines following a bird strike, and Bob Pearson, who was piloting an Air Canada Boeing 767 which had been incorrectly fuelled by someone causing it to run out of fuel whilst in cruise. He glided it for about fifty miles, and sideslipped it into a disused airfield, and it was his ability at knowing how to do all that stuff in gliders which enabled him to pull that off.

If you can fly an aeroplane with no engine, you can fly anything. Oh, and you get really nice enamel badges when you do your first solo and lots of other nice ones when you achieve other stuff. 🙂

Edited December 26, 2020 by Chock

[cmpbellsjc 2,963]

6 hours ago, 177B said:

I got my licence back in 1978.

Cost about $7,000.00 at the local airfield then B20 now called KIZG.I

If only we still had the pricing we had back then, although back then it still seemed expensive.

I started back in 1986 flying out of Tucson Intl. (KTUS) in a Piper Tomahawk and then moved to the high desert of California and flew out of Apple Valley (KAPV) in a Cessna 152.

The rates as I remember were about $30 an hour for the plane and $15/hour for the instructor. At the time it seemed like a lot but I was young and fortunate that my grandparents paid for my training fees as I was only a teenager at the time.

Now, here in the Dallas area a simple 152 or equivalent is around $120-130 per hour and I think instructors are ~ $40. 20 hours dual and 20 hours solo will cost a heck of a lot more that what we paid.

[overspeed3 410]

CHOCK,

Only a desk-top pilot, plus a senior citizen.  I used to watch gliders take-off and land in a Wurtsboro NY airfield near my upstate summer home.  The one thing I always wondered about gliders:  You don't really get much of a chance to go-around - but I never personally heard of a fatal or near fatal glider accident in all the summers I spent there...

[nachezdc9 25]

I,m a real pilot, actually flying Airbus 330 and 350 as a first officer for an european airline. I started flying md80 as my first job and after years and some different airlines I was hired by my actual airline. 

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,318]

In the UK there is a cheaper and less stringent route than PPL. We have a LAPL licence, can be had for around 5-6k (GBP). 

[Chock 17,769]

4 hours ago, overspeed3 said:

CHOCK,

Only a desk-top pilot, plus a senior citizen.  I used to watch gliders take-off and land in a Wurtsboro NY airfield near my upstate summer home.  The one thing I always wondered about gliders:  You don't really get much of a chance to go-around - but I never personally heard of a fatal or near fatal glider accident in all the summers I spent there...

Oh there certainly are fatal glider accidents. I've known three pilots who were killed whilst gliding - all in the same mid-air collision - it happens on occasion unfortunately. They were too low down to use their 'chutes.

But as far as landing goes, you've actually got quite a lot of things on your side which help when judging a landing circuit in a glider.

The two big things which help are the glide ratio of a sailplane and the other specialised wing features, more on that in a moment. A sailplane's glide ratio is usually at least 30 to 1, and more often than not quite a bit more than that, some really long-winged glider can have glide ratio of as much as 60 to 1, which means if the thing is flown well and trimmed properly on an aeroplane with a 30 to 1 glide ratio, theoretically for every 30 feet it flies forwards, it will lose just 1 foot of altitude.

If you think about that, if you were up at 800 feet in a glider, if you times 800 by 30, that will of course give you how many feet that glider could theoretically go in still air, which works out at about four and a half miles. Now if you try that with a swept-wing airliner, which might have a glide ratio of possibly 4 to 1, that thing would be hitting the deck in less than half a mile.

The other thing is, most gliders have spoilers on the wings which can help for a final approach, and so do airliners, so if you stay high on finals, these can be used to dump massive amounts of lift, so the good thing about this is that you can err well on the side of caution when picking a field to land in, and stay pretty high on the approach so you know you will make it, then on short final you can pop out the spoilers and lose a lot of altitude fast, thus you come in right 'over the fence', which means you can use a lot of the field to land and hopefully the first very bit you are over so you have bags of room.

When you combine the excellent glide ratio of a sailplane with the ability to pretty much pick where you want to touchdown even when you are really high on approach courtesy of spoilers, you can see how and why gliders have a lot of advantages when it comes to greasing it in on a field and never really having to worry too much about not getting it right, hence the lack of worry about not having the ability to go around. Of course it is still possible to @rse things up if you are a poor pilot, but you'd have to be a truly inept pilot to really manage that.

Fledgling glider pilots are usually taught to watch out for suitable places to land at all times (this is not a bad thing for all GA pilots to do actually), and to stay within a 4 to 1 glide angle of them. Traditionally, how that is taught, is you get a book or magazine, plonk it in the middle of a big sports hall, and then get the trainee to imagine that he is in his aeroplane looking at a potential landing field by imagining the magazine on the floor is a distant field. He will then be asked to point out where he needs to be at the start of his circuit to be about 800 feet above the field at the start of it for a 4 to 1 glide angle, so he can come down to 600 feet on the downwind, getting all the gear and flaps sorted, then turn for the base leg and come down to about 400 feet, then turn onto finals and hopefully be about 200 feet up, then use the spoilers to manage that final descent. If you do that right, it'd be really pretty hard to mess it up.

The other thing glider pilots often get taught, is how to judge altitude without the altimeter, since if putting the thing down in some random field, your altimeter would be largely useless. So normally what happens, is some evil instructor will blank off the altimeter in the front cockpit, and then at various altitudes, the guy in the front will be asked to say what height they are currently at. After a while of having to do that, you start to learn that at a certain altitude, sheep in fields will appear to have no legs, specific models of cars will be difficult to identify and that sort of thing. This method is also taught to fighter and bomber pilots for when they fly at low level on practice missions and it's not a bad idea for GA pilots to learn that skill too for if they ever need to do a forced landing. Of course glider pilots are usually pretty clued up on weather as well and more often than not they will be able to tell you the wind speed and direction without a windsock in sight, so this helps with landings too.

As noted, the glide ratio of some specialist really long winged sailplanes can be as much as 60 to 1, but as I say a typical one you'd see at a local gliding field would probably be maybe 35 to 1 or so, although the best glide speed of many sailplanes can actually be altered by adding water ballast to their wing tanks. This makes them heavier, and that shifts the glide polar envelope graph curve line down and to the right, meaning the best glide occurs at a faster speed, This is done so that in competitions, you can climb in a thermal with slightly more difficulty owing to the increased weight, but this is offset by the fact that when that patch of lift you are using peters out, you can hammer it over to another thermal at very high speed, losing minimal height and spending as little time as possible in sinking air, then you slow down and circle in the new thermal. So there are quite a few options for how you set up a glider. Additionally, many of them have flaps which can be set to a negative angle as well as a positive one, reducing the efficiency of the wing in terms of creating lift, but also significantly reducing induced drag too, for when you are making those high speed dashes between areas of lift.

As noted, in contrast to all that super-efficient wing design, the average swept-wing airliner will have a still air glide ratio of perhaps as little as 4 to 1 and at best maybe 9 to 1, which is not great, but of course in the same way as a helicopter stores up energy when autorotating by using the airflow to wind up the speed on the free-spinning rotor blades so it can use that to slow its touchdown by raising the collective, gliding an airliner (or other powered aeroplane unfortunate enough to have lost its power) in for a smooth touchdown can be done by diving the thing to gain a lot of airspeed, then using that stored energy up in a flare at the last moment. Knowing about this kind of stuff from their extensive gliding experience is why Captains such as Sully and Pearson where able to land their airliners nicely even when they had no thrust available other than that which gravity had provided.

You can do all this stuff in your sim by the way, and even more so with something like Condor II, the glider sim, and if you like all that kind of thing, you will find it makes you a better pilot, particularly if you want to try to land your sim's A320 on the Hudson River.

Edited December 26, 2020 by Chock

[CFIJose 5,485]

To the OP,

Pilots learn early that the Pilot's Certificate is a license to learn. My CFI Certificate is my license to teach. There are a few reasons why student pilots never reach their goal to become a Private Pilot and at the top of the list is, money. Right bellow that is the desire to finish. If you really enjoy this hobby, you can start as a Drone Pilot, then a Sports Pilot, then go from there. You might even one day have your own Mooney or Cessna 310 and make YT Videos and share your flights.

MSFS is a good start that can help you stay motivated and involved. My quest to become an FAA DPE has been halted by Covid-19, but my desire is strong enough that I will continue on quest to reach my goal.

This sim has kept my head involved in aviation and I love it!

[HighBypass 2,339]

13 hours ago, sd_flyer said:

Often people get comfortable with airplane before they got comfortable with communication...

Even as an armchair pilot that happens to me in the sim! 

9 hours ago, Chock said:

You only pay a small rate per hour for a glider and the cost of the launch, after that, there are no other costs for fuel or anything like that. so it is if not exactly dirt cheap, then certainly within the reach of most people with a job and a few quid to spare each weekend

The club local to me and which I was a member for a year had the following pricing structure at the time (3 years ago):

IIRC Annual Membership was £220

£6 per winch launch (no aerotow) - cable breaks were no charge! 

30 pence per minute flight time.

So you can indeed see how cheap it is to fly. Mind you the club was one where everyone was expected to pitch in - there were no dedicated ground staff. One had to help get the toys out of the hangar and put them away again at the end of the day, use the tractors for cable and glider retrieval, not to mention if you were in the glider, to walk holding a wing to aid in such retrieval after landing. One could also move up to being a winch operator too.

[RLJR 14]

I got my private Lic. in 1958. Got the commercial Lic. in about 1969. 

[Chock 17,769]

25 minutes ago, HighBypass said:

Mind you the club was one where everyone was expected to pitch in - there were no dedicated ground staff. One had to help get the toys out of the hangar and put them away again at the end of the day, use the tractors for cable and glider retrieval, not to mention if you were in the glider, to walk holding a wing to aid in such retrieval after landing. One could also move up to being a winch operator too.

That's how it is at most glider flying clubs, quite often there's a duty roster for members where you have to work the radios, the winch, drive the cable tractor or be the flight line person for the day and that usually comes around once every couple of months or so, although most of the time if there is someone who can take over for a bit when it is your duty day, you can quite often squeeze a quick flight in for yourself too. 

The only really bad point about that is you do have to get up pretty early for one of those duty days, and since most flying sites operate all year around, you might find yourself out in the cold all day at this time of year. Not the end of the world if you like being around aeroplanes and chatting about them to like minded people, but something to bear in mind.

[mtr75 653]

14 hours ago, jon b said:

I was a teenage flight simmer in the late 1980s , solo flight and Sublogic FS2 on the C64 and later the Amiga.

I got lucky and made the leap into real aviation and then up through the ranks to take command of a 747 aged 32.

I won’t pretend it was an easy journey but it can be done.

If you’re thinking of training for a PPL then great go for it. However if you’re thinking of trying to get into commercial aviation at the moment I’d mirror the advice of the unions and say don’t waste you’re time or money just now.

The  Aviation industry, along with almost everything else is in absolute free fall right now and it’s going to take years to recover.

Most of my Pilot friends from the 747 are presently driving delivery vans for a living. 😢😢

Boy would I love to have a few pints with you and hear your stories. What kind of flying do you do in MSFS?