At the end of the move Rush (great movie by the way), Niki Lauda is preflighting a Lear and James Hunt happens upon him on his way to fly somewhere interesting. The two engage in their typical act of giving each other a hard time, and as part of that conversation Niki encourages James to get into flying because it would add some structure to his life. James then makes a comment about how he thought Niki was going to get poetic about flying. Rather, as the calculating Austrian noted, flying was simply another structured environment into which he could stretch his skills. I can't say I blame him. To a certain degree, I look at aviation the same way.
I've never really sat down to analyze my interest in flying. To me it's always been a passion, but I never understood why. I'd imagine that, for most people, a true passion is just something that's ingrained in them; something that doesn't quite make sense in a logical fashion, but something that has a certain gravity to it. Any time someone's asked me why I got into aviation, I've usually deflected the question with a joke about how, as a kid, I saw Peter Pan fly on his own, tried to do the same myself, fell flat on my face, and realized that I'd need a plane to help me out. I don't think I've ever been able to explain it, and that probably makes more sense knowing that my parents say that I've been enamored with aviation ever since I was a little kid. Occasionally, though, I let myself wander and make decisions that pull me away from flying, which was a partial cause for my lack of flying in 2014. Life is a journey, though, and it's not usually one without mistakes.
Quite a number of things happened in the past year, and none of it personally aviation related. Let me first qualify that by saying that I mean "personally aviation related" in the sense that I made no personal progress towards my ratings. More specifically, I haven't logged a flight since the last post on this blog. I have, however, spent a lot of time in and around planes.
A significant portion of my aviation-related time was spent as part of a crew flying a DC-3. While my stick time is limited to cruise legs here and there, it's my goal to eventually work up the ladder to get the ratings necessary to add bars to the jacket and shoulders, and sit up front. As it stands, though, I'm the radio/nav guy with one bar. I don't object to that in the least, however, as it gives me the opportunity to fly around in a DC-3 and hang out with with a great crew. I had alluded to getting to meet the crew in a
post back in October of 2013, but I'm kinda surprised I didn't write more about it since then. If you're interested in following along with those adventures, the plane has a
Facebook page. I imagine I'll be including a post here and there about my adventures in that part of my aviation experience. Over time, I have a feeling that it'll become more dominant, just as I have a feeling that I'll eventually drop the "(In Training)" off of the blog title. For the people who believe in continuous learning, worry not - I agree with that mentality, but I do also think that it's worth dropping the qualifier off as soon as I work my way into a professional flying job of some sort. While I doubt that I'll be going into any airline flying, there are definite opportunities around me, which I'm rather lucky to have.
Additionally - and probably slightly more significantly - I accepted a position with Precision Manuals Development Group, or PMDG. Like the DC-3, I've also mentioned PMDG here on the blog before, as I'd started to help them test their software
back in 2013. The current position is a paid one, which has afforded me more of an opportunity to get back up and flying (though I haven't made any posts about the flights yet). Unlike most of my other jobs, this one also has a lot of potential to let me grow into using some of my other talents.
The first two projects I helped with as a member of the team were updates to existing products - the 737 and 777 - to bring them into new simulators (Lockheed Martin's Prepar3D, and a reboot of Microsoft's FSX in Steam). Next up is a ground-up rebuild of the 747 product, and an entirely new project: the DC-6.
Like the DC-3 opportunity, I'm really excited to see where this goes. On that note, I'm headed off to discuss just that with the owner. Look for some posts about the recent flights sometime in the near future.
