Back in the air

17 years ago when I was 17, I took flying lessons but never completed them to get my private pilot's license. This week I had my first flying lesson in 17 years. I've decided to keep this blog to chronicle my experience this time around.

My high school offered an aviation program. I remember choosing classes for 9th grade and being excited to see "aerospace 1" in the course list. Then I discovered that it was only available to Sophomores or better. A friend of mine was disappointed too, but as it turns out the teacher was a friend of his parents, and with some discussion we were both admitted into the class. Aerospace 1 led to Aerospace 2, and the creation of Aerospace 3. Essentially these were ground school classes - I passed my private pilot written, and I believe my commercial written exams.

I started taking lessons at the local FBO in 1990 with $3000 I had saved from my paper route. The money got spent quickly as I amassed a total of 24 hours. Then, when I was about to run out of cash I realized I had to figure out how to pay for college. Flying went on the back burner.

I didn't think about flying for a long time. Then a few years ago when I was working at Microsoft I was trying to find a new group to work in. I applied and interviewed with the Flight Simulator team. While I did well in the interview loop, I didn't get the position. The group was re-orging at the time and it seemed like the position dried up. In the end I left Microsoft to join a casual game start up. But I was now thinking about flying again.

My buddy from high school and I have a pact that we made back then. (My buddy, Fareed, BTW is now a professional pilot.) We've always said we would like to build a kit plane together if we lived in the same city. We don't, but a year ago I started reading all of the kit-plane magazines and blogs. This lead to reading the pilot magazines and thinking about flying again. My wife gave me a DVD pilot course for Christmas, and I made a new years resolution to get my license in 2007.

It's now July and I bit the bullet last week. I emailed a number of local flight instructors with the plan to pick out a couple to fly with. The first person I flew with, Ed Bryce, is inexpensive and seems to have a wealth of experience. His teaching style suits me too, I think. We have our second lesson scheduled for this morning.

I decided to keep this blog after reading another pilot's blog chronicling his experience learning to fly. Check out Tom Unger's blog here.