Learning to Fly

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, I’ve starting thinking about taking flying lessons when the pandemic is over. My primary concern is that flying is not an inexpensive hobby. I’ve read that one should expect to spend about $10,000 getting a private pilot’s license, and a friend of mine said that flying regularly once you have a license is likely to cost a similar amount each year.

But I’m thinking about it. While poking around on the web I found that a flying club at a nearby airport is currently holding their monthly meetings on Zoom and that interested non-members are welcome to attend, so I did that last Wednesday. I was the only new person in the meeting, and the organizer invited me to introduce myself. After I told the group who I was and why I was there, they couldn’t have been more welcoming and encouraging. It seemed like a group I would be happy to be a part of.

One thing the members of the flying club said was that retirement is an especially good time to start flying because a private pilot without an instrument certification benefits from having a flexible schedule. Someone who can fly only on weekends, for example, might find that the weather keeps them from going up several weeks in a row, whereas someone who can fly pretty much anytime is much less constrained.

One of the members of the club recommended that I read a book by Gordon Baxter called How to Fly: For People Who Are Not Sure They Want To, so I bought it and am two chapters in. A pilot friend of mine recommended the book Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying by Wolfgang Langewiesche, so I’ll read that next.

Getting a pilot’s license involves both classroom training, commonly called “ground school,” and flight training. It turns out that I could do the classroom training on my own while the pandemic is ongoing. That would give me a project to do over the winter, and then I could taking flying lessons after there’s a vaccine.

We’ll see.