Six Thousand…

Author’s Note: I wrote this a couple of years ago when I noticed a nice round number in the “totals” column at the bottom of a page in my logbook. I never found a place to publish this little essay and had forgotten about it until I was cleaning up some files on the computer. I have accumulated more hours since that time, but the idea is the same—we are always adding experience to our logbooks and our lives.

When I first soloed an airplane with just a touch over six hours in my logbook, I thought, “Wow, when I have the forty for my private, I’m going to be really experienced!”

When I got that private ticket with 40.5 hours total time, I thought, “If I ever have the 250 hours I need for a commercial, I’m going to be experienced! And boy—I didn’t know anything when I soloed…”

When I had that commercial ticket and looked back at how little I knew when I got that private ticket, I realized that flying was always about continuous learning. The more time you spent on the details of that learning, the better you’d be—but there would always be more to learn. And so I concentrated on getting minutely better all the time, holding my tolerances tighter, making the airplanes do exactly (not just approximately) what I wanted them to do. When I want to climb at 97 knots, I don’t want to be at 96 or 98. Fine skills to shoot for—and sometimes even achieved.

I have never flown for an airline, never flown charter, towed banners, or dropped skydivers. I’ve never carried freight or canceled checks; never flown where I got paid for how many hours I put in the logbook. My flying has always been to become a better pilot, to learn as much as I could about what makes airplanes better or worse and how I could get my skills more tightly honed and precise. When I owned my first airplane, I was well known at the airport for going up and shooting a dozen touch-and-goes in an hour, chasing that elusive “perfect landing” from different approach profiles.

My heroes have always been test pilots, designers, engineers—folks who wanted to explore what makes an airplane good at something. Sure, I use my airplanes for transportation, but I long ago passed the point of having to prove to anyone that I can fly straight and level for hours on end. So a lot of that traveling is with the autopilot on and my brain working on understanding the winds and weather, learning—again—what makes an airplane good at what it is doing.

Many of the pilots I have worked with in my career were the same—but they had the advantage of being among the top military test pilots in the world. I learned from and with them as we took flying machines from the atmosphere and out into space. I have a lot of time in simulated flight, but I count most of that in a different logbook. When I climbed into an actual cockpit, I had to satisfy myself primarily with machines that burned avgas instead of kerosene—and I have flown a huge number of different machines. But I rarely put more than a couple of hours in each type, just figuring out what I needed to know about it, maybe making suggestions to the designers about what could be made better and figuring out what these different types could teach me.

The hours build, but not like if I was helming 747s across the Pacific or over the poles. My hours are shorter and often more intense, trying to wring as much information from the plane in as short a period as I can. The highlights of a year of flying for me might be contained in a few tens of special hours in widely different machines. To me, it’s quality that counts—but I admit to being vain enough to keep track of the numbers because I know that quantity still matters to me.

The lesson I’d offer, after all these years of logging time, is to fly for the experiences that you want—not what others expect. If your goal is to work in aviation for a living, then you might end up with 30,000 hours or you might have 6,000—it depends on what you want to do with your time in the air. Flying the same hour thousands of times might, to some, be very dull—but if that “same hour” is watching sunsets from a Cub on a summer evening, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t quality time. Likewise, commanding a big Boeing as it stretches its wings across the globe might seem boring to many—but all you need do is read a little Ernie Gann to understand that airline flying has its own challenges and rewards. No matter who your heroes might be in aviation, pattern your hours—and your logbook—after the things you want to get out of your time in the air.

And so, as I was cruising over the mountainous desert near my Nevada home, I noted that 6,000 hours had been tallied in the “Total Flight Time” column of my logbook. Six thousand hours since that very first hour in a J-3 Cub, flying off the grass alongside the paved runway back in Minnesota. I have been blessed to fly a wide variety of machines in those hours: some pleasant, some more eventful, and some downright scary—but all of them with something to teach me. Whether I flew a machine for 30 minutes or 300 hours, they all contributed to the pilot I am today. And now that I look back on those 6,000 hours, I think about the lessons those planes—and the atmosphere—have taught me and how little I really knew back when I became a commercially certificated pilot. And I look humbly forward, thinking how much more there is to learn—and I wonder what amazing machines I’ll be flying to continue becoming a better aviator.