Car to Plane Transfer

In a gallant effort to return me to the keyboard, a colleague recently challenged me to ramble on about car guys becoming pilots. He has a point, as unlike my modest weekend aviation credentials, my car guy bona fides are gold-plated.

How gilded is my automotive lily? Just after high school and pumping gas at the airport to get my private pilot certificate in the mighty Cessna 150, I next took up tools in an independent Mercedes garage. And did some road racing with the SCCA and became a full-time auto journalist for 30 years. I’ve driven hundreds of cars, including all sorts of go-fast stuff on 36 different racetracks. From stone stock econoboxes through import sedans to legions of hopped-up Ford Mustangs, add an enviable share of classics such as E-Jags and gullwing Mercedes up to honest to Jack Roush Trans Am Mustangs and Cup cars at Road Atlanta (with the dip) to Pedro de Larossa’s Jaguar Formula One car at the Hungaroring. I’ve had my mitts on all sorts of automotive hardware and walked among the pavement royalty.

So, just as I look up knowingly when a Lycoming ambles overhead, when I hear the distant snarl of a prepped V-8 in the nighttime distance, it is the sound of my people—the drum call to action and trigger to a thousand memories.

And so on to auto and aviation enthusiasts, and how their Venn diagrams overlap. And yes, pilots, and for sure car enthusiasts, span huge swaths of demographics, personalities, and motivations, so you must forgive my broad brush in this short, stereotyping overview.

For obvious reasons, there’s little need to detail native aviators here, other than to note such fly types are typically rules-oriented, leadership-following techno-nerds who defer to authority and color between the lines. They do well in the classroom and appreciate a good instructor in the cockpit. They’re at home with aviation’s conformity norm, set by the discipline of military and airline flying back when leather and goggles went out of service. The outer world may be uninterestingly distant and a slave to fashion to these natives, but then, crew cuts haven’t been passé at the airport since Frank Luke Jr. crossed his arms in front of his SPAD XIII.

By contrast, car guys are cowboys and pirates with a soft spot for looking good. Where fitting into the system is exciting to the proto fly-borg, beating the system is inherent in automotive enthusiasm. Car guys tend toward competitiveness far over safety, so appealing to their vestigial rational sense does no good. Furthermore, in practice, nearly all car people start in street cars (as opposed to pure racing machinery), and as any street car can easily exceed legal and societal limits, exploration of automotive performance automatically means breaking the law. That’s an incentive to anyone still in their mental teens.

It doesn’t help that while aviation regulations are there to guide the pros, automotive rules exist to protect common idiots. Given some Class G airspace, I’m legal to fly VFR at night, clear of clouds, in 1 s.m. of visibility, something far exceeding my humble skills but not a worry to an aerial applicator who flies 12 hours a day (and night) and just needs to hop his Air Tractor a few miles back to the barn on a low, overcast night. The FAA expects us to be vetted as prudent adults valuing our continued existence, but not so the state department of transportation. In the automotive realm, the rules vary from intelligent, to capricious, to revenue-generating, and even if nominally targeted for the 85th percentile regarding speed, are just as often designed to protect drunks on their way home.

Given a desire for performance and loosely hemmed in by rules for the impaired, many an auto enthusiast is primed to practice his hobby extra-legally. For some, this means small rules broken carefully; for others, it’s an embrace of wanton, petroleum-fueled licentiousness until the law, or the law of averages, catches up with them. But the overall point is car guy culture embodies a wink at the rules, often along with lax technical robustness, as there is always the side of the road should you snap a blower belt.

If the car guy is as cavalier about his hobby as the Puss ‘n Boots cat, it’s not a good fit at the airport. So, when a car guy finally has the time and treasure to venture beyond his first hobby, his exploratory trip to the airport uncovers a layer of bureaucracy and aerial Boy Scouts setting a tone of conformity and safety. Such killjoys often make that the last trip to the airport, and there it ends.

To those more committed to exploring aviation, the challenge is still mainly cultural. The rules matter, the weather is for real, the hardware is far less approachable, and the whole flying thing is more complex, expensive, and cerebral than mashing the loud pedal and pulling gears. That’s not to ignore that the greater challenge of flying could be the draw, of course. And there are similarities. Piston engines are the common denominator among planes, cars, and powerboats, and the fascination with infernal combustion should never be underestimated. Aircraft engines are big, dumb, and antique to most gearheads, but at least they’re big and must be stone-cold reliable.

The challenge, then, is reorienting the car guy to a new, truly more dangerous world if the goal is to grow sport aviation from the magnitudes-larger world of performance cars. It is done by coaxing and example, not demanding. Play the school principal and you’ll only get truancy and tire smoke in the parking lot. Leading the way through stick and rudder excellence and gently welcoming the newcomer to airport society is the path to success.

Don’t forget the car guy likes poking the edges of the envelope. There’s an intensity and instant reward in hitting the pedal in a 700-hp car that a Cessna 172 doesn’t quite replicate. Holding an enthusiast’s interest long enough to instill the basics and getting him (supervised) into more trying machinery is another major challenge in capturing this guy. Friendly, but demanding, instruction could be key. Beating the safety drum until the skin tears—not so much.

A bit about technology is also relevant. Yes, there is the commonality of piston engines, but keep in mind aircraft engines are typically large, slow-turning, endurance champions—the antithesis of the high-strung, quick, and high-revving tuned auto engine. Also, general aviation’s mechanical technology is antediluvian, a real turnoff to many car people. More promising, car modernists are often electronically savvy, something the hoary plaid shirts banging rivets in solitary confinement are most assuredly not. But the electronic nativity of a modern car guy remains a path to explore on the instrument panel and in flight planning.

And then there is cost. Car people come in a thousand flavors, some low-buck and many decidedly better-funded. But, by any measure, aviation hardware has already surpassed all but the dedicated amateur’s purse, so some sort of club or shared ownership could be a great enabler. At least aviation’s cost helps weed out the automotive squirrels.

Of course, the best enabler for the car pilgrim is patient and helpful mentors at the airport. Telling the newbie he’s wasted his time in cars while adjusting your scarf would send anyone back to the garage; sharing a beer and acknowledging the technical knowledge and skills gained while under a Chevy’s hood is a better tactic.

We’ll stop here for now, but if there’s interest, we can take up some of these topics in more excruciating detail in the future. For now, know enthusiasm for zooming things can take several forms, and it helps to appreciate the other guy’s starting point.