Don't Feed the FOMO
One of the things I did during my semiannual blog overhaul was remove my posts about aviation. There were several, ranging from my description of learning to fly, through a series of flights I took to visit airports around Massachusetts, and some other miscellaneous essays. I still have them stored locally on disk, but don’t intend to put them back online anytime soon.
While learning to fly was a lifelong dream, and became a major avocation for a decade, several threads converged that convinced me to quit. One of those also convinced me that I should remove my blog posts on the subject.
First, I’d reached a plateau, or perhaps a cruising altitude, in aviation. After flying with the basic Private Pilot certificate for a few years, I’d gotten my Instrument rating, which can really be considered the other half of basic aviation training. The initial Private Pilot certificate is a license to fly under “visual” conditions, which has a detailed legal definition that boils down to “stay out of clouds.” The Instrument rating extends that to allow flying through conditions where you can’t see outside the airplane. Doing that safely means learning a lot more about how the air traffic control system works, as well as developing the skills to navigate and fly a fast-moving aircraft very precisely through three-dimensional space.
I’m proud of having accomplished that level of competence in the cockpit, and it was immensely rewarding to use and practice those skills from time to time. However, it became abundantly clear that the kind of aviating I was doing, flying small airplanes around the northeastern US, wasn’t especially useful. We have easy access to the interstate highway system and a major regional airport with lots of airline connections. For any practical trip, either driving or flying commercially is cheaper and often faster than piloting myself in a Piper Cherokee. That left me little to do with my pilot certificates besides some highly unnecessary outings: a day trip to Nantucket for chowder, or a sightseeing flight down the Hudson River and back.
There are really only a few situations I can think of where flying a small airplane yourself makes sense: you’re a career flight instructor, you’re training to become an instructor, or a commercial or military pilot, or you’re an edge case of some kind, such as a hunting guide in Alaska or a ranch owner in Texas. None of those situations describe my life.
I did consider becoming a flight instructor, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that I was only saying that to rationalize a fundamentally irrational hobby. And there it was: for me, aviation was a hobby. Evaluating it in those terms revealed some major problems.
Shutdown complete.
First, there was the time commitment. In between my hundred-dollar hamburger runs, I tried to fly at least once a month to keep my skills sharp. That’s not just a good idea, it’s the law. Because complex skills such as flying an airplane tend to be perishable, the FAA has detailed requirements for “currency and recency” of experience. Flight instructors universally agree that those rules constitute a bare minimum, and I could see why. If I went more than a month or so between flights, I inevitably noticed a clear deterioration in my abilities.
Even a short practice flight required a significant chunk of time, though. Before taking off, I’d have to drive 25 minutes or so to the airport, perform preflight checks on the plane, fuel it up, and finally taxi to the runway. It always took at least an hour to go from walking out the door of my house to lifting the wheels off the ground. When I was renting planes from the flight school, the after-flight process was pretty quick: park, tie down, make sure I’d gotten my headset and other gear out, then drop off the keys and leave. During the time I spent in a local flying club, I also had to replace the canvas cover on the aircraft and do some electronic paperwork. Then, of course, I’d drive home, often having spent two or three hours to do half an hour of flying.
Another issue was the money. I’m not living check-to-check, but neither am I so rich I can ignore what things cost. Aviation was more expensive than all of my other hobbies combined, by a lot. Measured in dollars per hour of enjoyment, it was off the charts. That calculus weighed more and more on my mind every time I squatted down on an icy ramp to check the tires, while a frigid winter wind whipped across the open tarmac. I’m paying how much to do this?
Aviation is expensive for many reasons, but a big one is fuel. The smallest airplane I could rent averaged five gallons of aviation gas per hour, typically over $30 just for the gas. More often, I’d fly a slightly larger plane that burned 8-10 gallons an hour, and in the flying club I had access to one that burned closer to 14 gallons an hour. My car only holds about 9 gallons, and with a full tank can go 300 miles. On a morning practice flight, I could easily burn enough gasoline to have driven from my home in western Massachusetts to central Virginia. That’s a lot of oil, and a lot of carbon emissions.
As I said above, there are people who have perfectly valid reasons for flying around in small private airplanes, but I’m not one of them. While I’d been thinking about this problem for awhile, it really slapped me in the face one fine day last year, when I went up for one of my regular skill-maintenance flights. Practicing stalls and steep turns 3,000 feet over western Massachusetts, I noticed that the normally scenic view of the Berkshires was severely degraded by the smoke from a massive outbreak of Canadian wildfires.
In a world literally on fire, I was burning large quantities gasoline for my own entertainment. There was simply no way I could justify that to myself, let alone anyone else.
I flew a few more times after that, but knew I wasn’t going to keep doing it much longer. When my aviation medical certificate was coming up for renewal early this year, the timing seemed right, so I just let it lapse. Flying was a wonderful experience for a decade, and I learned a lot and met a lot of fascinating people, but now I’m done.
I don’t exactly regret having gotten into flying. It was something I’d always wanted to do, and I did it. But given my experience, and especially my slow realization of the impact it had on the planet, I’d rather not encourage others to do the same thing. Like everyone else, I curate my public identity. To the extent that it could influence anyone else, I want that influence to be positive. Talking about how fun and interesting it is to fly a small airplane will inevitably feed someone else’s Fear of Missing Out, and perhaps inspire them to take up aviation as a hobby as well. I no longer want to feed that desire.
If you’re a young person seriously planning to pursue a career in flying, either in the civilian or military sector, then by all means go fly. But if you’re just looking to check off a middle-aged “bucket list” item, try revising your list. The world offers many other fascinating experiences that make far better hobbies.