Becoming a pilot is a serious endeavor. Some people dream about it their whole lives, others start their journey very young. When is the “right” time to start? According to Jason Blair, who worked as an FAA Designated Pilot Examiner, now is the perfect time. He lays out his reasons in his recent book, An Aviator’s Field Guide to the Pilot Career Path.
I have been a skier my entire life. An avid one when my time and budget allows. A film series by Warren Miller that highlighted skiing in its early days and all forms of “snow riding” in more recent years was something I and many other skiers around the world watched over the years. I bring this up because Warren Miller had a saying, “If you don’t do it this year, you will only be one year older when you do.” He was talking about going on adventures to places where there was great snow riding, but the same holds true for flight training.
If you are thinking about learning to fly, potentially doing it as a career, and are pretty certain it is a path you want to pursue, now is the time to start. Many people have questions about whether it is too early or too late to do it, though.
You might be reading this thinking, “Am I too young to start?” or on the other end of the spectrum, “Am I too old to start?”
I can tell you as an examiner I have conducted practical tests for 17-year-olds (the youngest age you can get a Private Pilot Certificate) and one for a 78-year-old individual. Now, I will say it is probably too late to start an aviation career if you are getting your first pilot certificate at 78; in his case, it was a bucket list item in life. But if you are middle-aged, this doesn’t mean it is too late.
One thing that I can say I have experienced is that the cost of flight training doesn’t get cheaper. The cost has gone up throughout my career, and when I learned to fly, everyone who had done it years before me told me stories about how much cheaper it had been in their day. If you are going to learn to fly, starting now is the time. It isn’t going to get cheaper in the future.
If you’re a young person and want to get started, Blair has some advice specifically for you:
When starting flight training, there are both practical and legal limitations to what can be considered “too young.” For a powered aircraft, you aren’t allowed to solo until you are at least 16 years old and are not able to hold a private pilot certificate until at least 17 years old. This effectively means that you could reasonably begin your flight training when you are 15, solo after your sixteenth birthday, and become a private pilot after your seventeenth birthday. For those lucky pilots who do this, a group in which I was extremely fortunate enough to be able to count myself, you can complete initial pilot certification in high school. If you are reading this and thinking, “Darn, I am older than that,” you’re not too late. This is just the absolute youngest that it is practical to start.
If you are at least this old, you can start any time. … But no matter the age of a would-be future pilot, starting sooner than later is better.
But what if you’re older and want to transition into aviation? Blair says now is the appropriate time for you as well.
If you don’t get to learn at a young age, don’t despair. It isn’t too late. For many, learning to fly might be a career change or a second career if you retire early from another job path. It might also just be because you always wanted to get into flying and life didn’t give you the resources to do it earlier. [This] doesn’t mean it is too late. Even starting mid-life, a professional pilot’s career earnings potential, lifestyle, and working conditions can be highly attractive and worth the pursuit.
I have seen many people who couldn’t afford to learn to fly at a younger age work their way through the certification path and get to be a professional pilot in their mid-life years. . . . [S]ome folks become flight instructors as retirement gigs. Not a traditional professional pilot mainline career path, but this can be a great retirement job for fun, to keep yourself flying, to have an opportunity to work with younger students and give back, and to get someone else to help pay for your flying fix.
Blair offers another benefit of changing careers and becoming a professional pilot. “Not every job is one that the human body can physically do for 40 to 50 years,” he says.
The job of an airline pilot, while sometimes stressful, for the most part is not a physically demanding one and thanks to the safety of our aviation system, it is usually pretty low stress. As a friend of mine once said, “It sure beats digging ditches.” Yeah. I imagine.
Though he allows that there is a point when being a professional pilot may not be worth the investment.
If you are 63 years old, it probably isn’t time to be targeting an airline career since we have a mandatory retirement age of 65 for airline pilots. Pilots can fly beyond that age in some private carriage flight operations and charter operations, but the realistic top for that is starting to look more like age 70 (65 for international operations) as insurance companies start to restrict pilots in those operations.
If you aren’t in your 20s, 30s, or even 40s, it’s not too late. You could have many years in a rewarding and profitable aviation career if you start training.
If you’re looking to start training—or if you want help educating your parents or other family members about the possibilities on the “pilot path,” you can pick up Blair’s book on the ASA website here.
Featured image by Guys Who Shoot at stock.adobe.com.
