Small airplane cockpit8/7/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Here’s a shot of it, proud and resplendent (so much as a Cessna can be either of those things) on the apron at Hanscom Field, outside Boston. In fact that plane was the last private plane I ever piloted - to Nantucket one weekend in August, 1990, shortly before going off to ground school at my first airline job. He would let me borrow it in exchange for instruction towards his instrument rating. I had a student, though, Fred Shelton, who owned a clean and well-equipped Cessna 182 that I was quite fond of. The cockpit of the Piper Warrior was a better design, ergonomically. The Cessna was boxy, and the position of the wing cut hazardously into one’s view. It’s hot, it’s cold, its very tight and it’s noisy as all hell. Worse even than Southwest.įor the record, I’ll note that I always was a fan of the low-wing Piper series over the high-wing Cessnas. What the hell did they know? Most people who look longingly at a small plane have never been in one. What a beautiful day for flying, right? How splendid it must be on a clear summer day, up there in the breeze. Ironically, I imagine that many of the people below were looking up at us, jealously. ![]() It was all I could do not to grab the controls and aim for a landing on the sand, fling open the Cessna’s flimsy door and run for the water, free at last! Looking at the people playing frisbee and splashing in the surf, I wanted nothing more than to be out of that blasted contraption and down there with them. And there, directly below, would be this gorgeous beach. I’d be up there at 2,000 feet in that claustrophobic cockpit, sweat dripping down, literally banging elbows with my student, bouncing around in the hot gusts, ears ringing, hoarse from trying to shout over the din of the unmuffled pistons. Summers were the worst. It would be some steaming day in July or August, and I’d be giving instruction in some tattered old 172 over the shoreline of Plum Island or Cape Cod. That makes me a snob, or a heretic, in the eyes of many private pilots. There was much about general aviation flying that I did not enjoy: the miserable pay, the tiny cramped cockpits that were either scorching hot or numbingly cold, the dismal suburban airports. But this is commercial, international flying. I love my job and the places it takes me I’m doing exactly what I dreamed about doing when I was a seventh grader. And it’s not that I don’t savor the thrill of flight. I feel that way about a lot of things, I suppose, and don’t we all. Frankly, as I see it, those are 1,500 hours - two full months aloft - that I’m never getting back. When I think back to those years, my memories aren’t especially fond. No fewer than 1,100 of those hours were logged as an instructor, teaching dentists and software engineers to fly in exchange for a salary so pitiful that I couldn’t afford groceries. I spent the better part of five years - from, roughly, autumn of 1985 through the late summer 1990 - immersed in the world of general aviation, as it’s called, slowly building time and collecting the various add-on licenses and ratings I’d need for an airline job. My logbook records almost 1,500 flight hours at the controls of various single-engine Cessnas, Beechcrafts and Pipers. The author on a flying lesson, circa 1980. ![]()
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