Hungry

https://www.goalcast.com/2018/04/30/les-brown/

The story related in the video linked to above is one that could and should motivate you.  However, it could also be a story that tells you that you are barking up the wrong tree.

I did not give my all in the effort to become a pilot until five years after my first lesson.  I did not have that drive or hunger to make that leap at first.  

It was not until I had made several other attempts to figure out what I was going to do with my life and had been beaten down in those attempts and by a divorce that I got what I refer to as fire in the belly.

Les Brown calls it hunger.  It is something inside that clicks and tells you to go all out, make the total commitment.

Unfortunately, some people never get that feeling, about anything.

I believe it is essential to have that feeling when attempting to build a career in aviation.  The same is certainly true of other challenging and worthwhile professions, but I can only speak of flying airplanes.

I am not a mind reader, but when I was a flight instructor, I had students who seemed to be very surprised by the process of learning how to fly.  It was as if they had thought it was going to be easier than it was, that they would just pick it up right away.

As a student myself, I expected it to be more difficult than it was.  My life up to that point had taught me to expect to be challenged to the limits and beyond.  I had that hunger, that fire in the belly, that prepared me to come away from a lesson feeling wrung out and pushed to beyond my ability to perform.  Overstress me and find my breaking point, so that I was over prepared for the realities.  I wasn't masochistic, I wanted to know that I had seen the toughest scenarios possible in training.  My last several instructors seemed to realize that and were happy to comply.

I mentioned it before, but I remember a day when I was working on my instrument rating, spending an hour or so sitting there with a hood on my head, so that all I could see was the instrument panel.  Watching those little gauges, interpreting what they were telling me and then doing what was necessary to comply with what the instructor told me to do.  The instructor looked at me and said, "You like this shit, don't you?"  I remember thinking, "Yes."  I was hungry.  I had the fire in the belly.

The Light Twin

Boeing 757-200F

Flying the 757 was one of the great pleasures of my aviation career.  It was a real challenge to learn how to use the Flight Management System, but the plane flew like a dream.  It had a great feel and it encouraged me to fly it the way I had flown some of the better light airplanes I had flown.  

It was a flexible airplane.  It mixed in well with the big planes at the big airports and it mixed in well with the small planes at the small airports.  The way we flew it at UPS, it did plenty of both.  The 75 was capable of doing short flights to short runways and it was capable of flying coast to coast.

Early in my time as a new 757 captain, I flew with a young woman who had mastered the automation of the airplane.  I learned more by watching her fly a complex arrival at KMDT, Middletown Airport at Harrisburg, PA.  The controller was giving us lots of heading, altitude and speed changes as we were being vectored for an approach and I just sat there, talked on the radio and marveled at how smoothly and calmly she dialed up all that magic.  It was the first time I had hope that I would be able to be that smooth and eventually I was.

The 757 was used exclusively in the UPS domestic system back then.  I was able to fly to some of the 50 states I had not flown to yet.  Connecticut, New Hampshire, Montana and Mississippi were added to my resume.