Edited to clarify: These are not my words. I'm simply cutpasting from JetBlast in PPRUNE. Reluctant,
I know exactly what you mean.
I've spent much of my career flying very close to the ground in the mountains and in terrain, doing formation work, and doing a lot of hands on kind of flying. I enjoy it very much; it's why I love to fly.
Presently I spend a lot of long hours between departure and destination, much of it on autopilot. I spend much more time studying, monitoring, doing numbers, than flying. However, if asked what my favorite job is, and my favorite airplane might be, it will always be the one I'm being paid to fly right now...this very moment...whatever that might be.
At the moment I'm flying a 747. It doesn't do things quickly, and there's seldom any drama involved. It's not what one might call exciting, and it's often referred to as an old man's airplane, or a gentleman's airplane for those who are overly polite. Personally, I find it just as challenging as other types of airplanes I've flown, but it's demanding in different ways. One of them is mastering mass; flying this airplane isn't about seat of the pants flying or stick and rudder skills nearly so much as it is mass-management. Another is a constant study in an effort to either get to know the airplane better, or remember on any given day the stuff I'm already supposed to know. That's a never-ending process.
I've spent many an hour flying down a burning box canyon, close to the trees and rocks, to make a precision drop at the bottom. Today, I spend a few minutes after a long ten hour flight, making an approach down a narrow electronic beam to a precision landing at the bottom...and the truth is that the complexities and attention to detail doing an instrument approach are every bit as much involved as all the other types of flying I've done. When I intereviewed for this job, I was asked if I thought I might get bored...and the truth is that while I told them I was looking forward to a little boredom...it hasn't happened yet.
There's pleasure to be found in nearly every kind of flying, even the most mundane, technical of it. If we were to simply engage autoflight and forget about it, perhaps it would be boring. However, to be as precise as possible, to hold headings and altitudes accurately, to fly an approach precisely, to constantly study and prepare for that next checkride or recurrent training event, keeps it interesting. I spent the last half of a recent trip from Europe to Puerto Rico in a fairly intense discussion with the rest of the crew about emergency procedures and systems. Perhaps to stay awake, perhaps just as a challenging "what if" kind of discussion..but afterward I went to my hotel room and took notes. That's a good discussion.
I can't afford to own an airplane. I can't afford to rent an airplane. I fly for a living because if someone wasn't paying me to fly, I wouldn't be able to do it at all...sort of the same reason I began flight instructing. I wanted to share what I did, and my seasonal job was crop dusting (aerial application)...what to do when the season's not on and there's no flying? Why, instruct, of course. I found I really liked instructing, I really liked the interaction, the sharing...and hey, let's face it...flying is flying.
I spend a lot of days on the road. I miss my family a lot, and frequently. I'm on a second marriage now, and being gone has challenges to all. I meet a lot of others on the road who have as a goal to fly as little as possible, and get paid as much as possible. To them I say best of luck, I hope it works out. For me, I'm all for getting paid, but I look forward to working as hard as possible and as much as possible; I want to fly. I don't like to sit. I don't like to wait. I've done a lot of that during my career, and I've spent much of my career working second jobs in order to afford to do what I do...fly for a living. It's part of the reason when the company calls and tells me there's a flight, where others will say "oh, no," I'll say "Oh, great!" I want to go fly.
I have no need of building hours. I've got enough. I'm not collecting type ratings. I just want to fly.
Try to look into the flying you're doing and see what there is in there that can challenge you. It's there, trust me. You got into this for a reason, and the joy of flying isn't just found in a single engine Cessna down low. It's everywhere. I think many times people go through life entirely unaware that the adventure they crave, or the interest, or the romance, is right there in front of them. Often it's just a matter of uncovering it, finding it.
We read of the romance of flying the hump in a C-46 in the WWII years. Those were the flying days, we might be tempted to think...why couldn't today be like then? But then they were cold, oxygen-deprived, and died by thousands. They struggled to navigate, to aviate, and with engines and equipment that routinely failed and broke down. They lived with challenges that seem romantic on a printed page of daring and adventure, but that aren't something we would normally knowingly seek out and embrace. It's all they had to work with.
I can fly over London today and hear echoes in my mind of airplanes flying far below, twisting and turning, fighting and scraping for the fate of their squadron, each other, themselves, their country. I can look down at Berlin and think of the same, imagine tall columns of smoke, and contemplate how much suffering others endured that I shall never know...and reflect on how grateful I am. The history still hangs in the air everywhere we go. We're lucky; we fly a time machine that connects one part of the world with the other, shrinks days to hours and minutes, and is a direct bridge between where we were long ago with this very moment.
It's all there if you'll close your eyes and see it. When I cross the English Channel, I can't see the airplane of Bleriot, but I can hear it, and I can feel it down there, and when I overfly the green fields in France, I am in the same sky that was cut and burned and shot up and filled with smoke and castor oil by the likes of Baron Von Richthofen, or Eddie Rickenbacker. I've often reflected as I roll out during a landing from an instrument approach to minimums how this was once a miraculous feat, and that it's still one. Let's face it, barreling through the sky in many tons of airplane to find a small spot of land and to precisely come to a rest on it will always be a miracle of sorts, just like flying itself, no matter how many times it's done. It just is.
I find true awe and inspiration in each of these events...so routine, so normal in day to day work, but each one by itself is nothing short of magic.
Stay with it. It's easy to let the day to day grind blind one's self to these things but in time as you have a moment and the inspiration, you'll reflect on these things and be quite amazed at what you've been missing. You'll see that it's been there all along. Let's face it...you're FLYING!!!
