JohnBurke

The experience you're gaining will benefit you throughout your career. Your time with students is CRM experience that will pay off when you're a check airman, a captain, a mentor, or instruct later. It will influence the way you deal with captains and copilots in the cockpit. If will influence the way you deal with the public, with dispatchers, mechanics, linemen and beyond. It's much more than a stepping stone.

Many today don't have any clue what it's really like to work ones way up the ladder. A few months, and they're off to an airline; many of us spent years, even a decade or two, getting there. To be clear, where many jobs recognize twenty years as the benchmark for retirement, a lot of us were just getting started at that point...and had and have undergone numerous furloughs, bankruptcies, mergers, downturns, downsizing, and other events throughout that time, to say nothing of years of slogging it out in junk airplanes full of boxes or bleeding patients, flying under wires with loads of poison, towing banners, and flying in ice and weather...after flight instructing for years and some of us continue to instruct and do all those other things, too.

There is a sense that if the airline cockpit isn't immediately available, an emergency is in progress, a career on-board fire that's got to be put out now, and that every second wasted is a million dollars off the other end.

Relax.

There's a very high probability you won't make it to that end before your dream job folds shop and goes bankrupt, before the economy collapses, before we have a cataclysmic political crisis as only a six year old in the Whitehouse can wring, before you get merged to the bottom of a new seniority list, before you lose your medical and find yourself doing something else, before you experience your first of many furloughs, yada, yada, yada...the same things that many of the rest of us have experienced, over and over.

The urge to rush to that shiny jet ("shiny jet syndrome") is strong. I know a lot of shiny jet place holders who do nothing but complain, who completely missed out on some of the best years of their career in their rush to get somewhere that they're not happy to be. I know others who are very happy, and who have enjoyed every step of the way. The happiest tend to be those who stopped to smell the flowers and who have a lifetime of memories to look back on. If you spend your career frazzled and frantic, desperate to get to the next "level," you'll never be happy at the one where you are.

Be happy. There's time.

I was furloughed, and found work immediately turning wrenches in a small 135 shop. They needed someone to do morning runs in a single Cessna, flying radioactive material from A to B. I'd just come from a 747...now I was flying a Cessna 210. Some might see it as a step down. The reality was that a lot of guys were out of work, looking.

When I wasn't flying, I was working as a mechanic, check airman, company instructor, 135 pilot. A steady stream of furloughed pilots, many from the various majors, stopped by the hangar, all doing the same thing, looking for work. I did have an opening for a freight pilot, flying single engine piston airplanes, and extra hangar work. They all turned it down, turned their noses up. They were real pilots; they were beyond doing that kind of work. They'd reached a point in their careers where instructing, flying single engine piston airplanes, and other such stuff, was beneath them. They moved on.

In time, they were back. They found that everyone and their dog was looking for work, and there wasn't any. Hat in hand, they wanted that single engine Cessna job. Only it wasn't available any more. A kid who was hungry and wasn't about to turn his nose up at it, had taken the work, and he was willing to work. "Is there anything at all?" They asked. "I'll do anything. Even part time." I suggested helping to wash airplanes, get a foot in the door, grab something when it opened up. Still beneath them. They moved on. Some I saw again, when they still couldn't find work.

There are those who really feel that they're destined for greatness, and anything less is runway behind them, to which they'll never return. There are others who understand that yesterday it might have been a 747, but today it's a Cessna: that's the job. It's not beneath them. They know that one is as valid as the other. It's experience, food on the table, and it's still flying, far better than other stuff. They know which side of the bread is buttered. Which is the best airplane, the favorite? The one they're flying now. Tomorrow might be different. Yesterday might have been different, but neither yesterday or tomorrow exist. Today exists. Thrive on what you're doing now. You might just see this material again.