Page 31 - April 2017 Twin & Turbine

the machine is placed in the pause mode followed by lesson repeats; more than you ever had to deal with “back in the day.” These “redo” events bother you a lot, but you try to put it out of your mind.
If you fly as a vocation, you begin to worry that someone in authority will eventually call your bluff and your career will end before you’re ready. If you use an airplane as a business tool, you begin to wonder how much longer you can continue to simultaneously juggle your business issues and PIC duties – a situation you successfully compartmentalized up until now.
Things begin to happen to you healthwise. Maybe, as my mom used to say, you “get the vapors” or “have a spell.” For example, maybe one morning, you awaken to find the room is spinning. Something like that really gets your attention so your significant other drives you to the hospital emergency room. Several hours go by before the test results come back and you find out you didn’t have a mini-stroke, but rather it’s an inner ear infection. Still, you reluctantly come to the conclusion that given your age, your mission readiness rating is not going to be 100 percent for much longer. And yet, the people that pay you to fly expect you to fly. If you fly for business reasons, you have to chase business using your airplane or the bottom line is going to suffer. Events are closing in on you and your options are dwindling.
Finally comes the day when you realize you have to park the heavy iron (or your prized magic carpet business airplane). Health issues that can’t be ignored or other people’s opinion of your abilities bring down the curtain on your corporate flight department or business flying career. When it happens, if you love to fly, it can be devastating.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can make a mid-course correction, meaning you can continue to fly even if you’re no longer producing revenue using your aviation skills. In short, unless you’re in such poor health that you simply aren’t able to fly, you can return to your roots but with the added value that your experience and skills bring.
Treat yourself to either outright ownership of a personal airplane or enter into a partnership with someone you know and trust. Don’t however try to recreate the halcyon days of flying the type of equipment you previously flew. Recognize that although you may be able to afford the initial cost of something like a well-used Navajo or Cessna 340, an airplane like that will eat you alive with maintenance costs.
Instead, something like a single-engine aircraft capable of safe flight in moderate IFR conditions is the ticket. (Trust me, when you are 70-plus years old, you won’t want to fly in icing conditions any more so a decent airplane like a mid-time Piper Lance or Beech Bonanza will do the job nicely.)
Rent if you must but renting gets really, really old quickly. So unless you’re really strapped and cannot afford an airplane of your own, don’t rent.
Once you have your new (to you) means of defying gravity, give to your community some of the joy that aviation brought to you when you were flying for a career or to support a business. Some worthwhile ventures to become involved with include: EAA’s Young Eagles program, the FAA’s FAASTeam safety efforts or one of the many organizations that provide
April 2017
free transportation to people with health problems, travel impediments or special needs.
Consider mentoring (and encouraging) young student pilots. If you have a CFI certificate, instruct part time. You won’t make much money but instrument instruction is an especially gratifying instruction specialty and with your experience you’re extremely qualified. An instrument student will feel as if they have won the lottery when they learn how much you can teach them beyond the basics.
Finally, you can offer to ride along gratis with recently licensed instrument pilots on days when the skies are gray. No need for hard IFR because the opportunity to teach is missing due to the stress; just go fly on the kind of cloudy day when a young pilot with only a few hundred hours will be nervous and unsure of him or herself. You might be old and not as supple as you once were, but you have something the younger crowd is lacking: real-world experience gained over d•ecades of dealing with all sorts of situations and weather.
Keep your hand in play. When the days or professional flying are over, there’s no need to cease to be a pilot who still approaches flying professionally. You’ll find that it’s at least as fulfilling as flyingforaliving–maybemoreso. T&T
John Loughmiller recently retired a second time – this time for good. His first career involved the broadcast industry, and he flew piston twins to support that business venture. His second career involved flying turboprops and piston twins as a con- tract corporate pilot. He’s a 5,800-hour CFII/MEI and author of over 200 aviation articles plus a book on aviation weather.
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