Hi! I am a 15-year-old boy, and I want to be a career general-aviation pilot (flight instructor/sightseeing tours/small-scale charter operations) in my locality (southwestern Oregon). I understand the age limitations and all that basic stuff, but I have an unusual problem:I live in a small town whose tourist-advertising slogan, "Powers, Oregon: Conveniently Located in the Middle of Nowhere" is extermely accurate; the nearest flight school is over an hour's drive away! Any suggestions?
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You have my sympathy. I used to drive 45 minutes in some of Suburban Chicago's most miserable traffic to get to the airport for an hour's lesson. I also hung around the airport before and after the flight to talk/swap tales with more experienced pilots. You may want to consider a summer or weekend job at the airport to help defray the costs and make the investment in the drive time seem less onerous.
Kid, welcome to the wonderfull world of aviation. Everyone who flies or works on aircraft does so because we have put up with tons of crap to be here. No one will beg you to do this, they will not even ask you. There are just too many people who want to do this already. You will spend all your time, money and resources to do this. If just getting to the airport seems like too much of a problem for you then you have no idea of the sacrifice we have all made just to feel those airplane wheels leave the ground.
Actually, the time spent driving does not seem interminable, as I am used to long drives (hey, the nearest place we can go to buy socks is a 130-mile round trip; we just go "into town" once or twice a month and do all our business all at once while we're there), but going that far for flying lessons carries with it obvious obstacles of a purely practical nature.
-Philip
Furthermore, my locality can actually be a blessing: the local airport certainly fits the description of a backcountry airport set forth in an article in Plane & Pilot Magazine that I read while on their website(www.planeandpilotmag.com), but with its close proximity to town (yes, the local airport really is outside the city limits), most of the potential concerns set forth in the article (weather data, communication with the outside world, etc.) are available locally, but only rarely do people actually come to the airport, making it a fantastic place to get away from the crowd. By the way, the P&P article on backcountry flying is in their September ''04 issue.
-Philip
By the way, the instructor that I'll be working with when I begin flight school has been an instructor at his current location for several decades and is certified to teach everything from Private Pilot-ASEL to instrument-AMEL to commercial as well as several other licences and endorsements and is still working on aquiring licencing to instruct higher levels of licences than he is already licenced to instruct.
Flyerdan, I've actually flown the route from Powers to North Bend in Flight Simulator 2000, using the Cessna 182S, to see how long it would take (ended up being approximately 8 minutes, and the drive there is about 1 hour, 15 minutes), and am currently flying the route from Powers to Bandon in Dreamfleet's C172 (available freeware for FS2000 from Simviation.com). In fact, here in the southwestern area of the state, a set amount of driving time will almost certainly translate into a much lower flight time than usual (the lion's share of the hour and a half of driving time would be spent on a winding gravel road).
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