ABSTRACT
While there was no stereotypical recruit to commercial aviation, almost forty percent of respondents had been military pilots (flying either fixed or rotary wing aircraft for either the army, navy or air force). Amongst the over sixty percent of respondents who had come to flying via the civilian route, one felt strongly enough about civilian flying training to add the following to his questionnaire:
The road to an airline cockpit is taxing. Most flight schools are interested only in your money and not your progress. They won’t, for obvious reasons, give you the straight dope on how hard the road ahead is. It is hard to make people who are not in the industry understand how many hoops you had to jump through. Why you took a $5-an-hour job pumping gas at an airpark in 120-degree Phoenix heat so you can hopefully get the chance to fly cargo two days a week. And why you had to quit your previous lucrative position as Assistant Chief Pilot of a large flight academy to pump that gas because being a flight instructor only looks good on a résumé for so long.
