This is the second article in a series titled “The Complete Guide To Becoming A Pilot”. If you haven’t read the previous article, please click here. To find all the articles in this guide, click here.
Despite what “Instagram Reels Motivators” tell you to “Just do it!”, the fact is that when considering a step that is supposed to impact your life quite heavily, the first question you should ask yourself is: Do I really want to do it? What are the consequences? and analyse the ifs.
Develop this way of thinking when it comes to making decisions until you become fast and efficient, as you will need it later on because there is no such thing as “Just do it” in aviation!
In Part 1, we will mainly talk about your personality; in Part 2, we will cover your technical side and the paperwork needed to apply to become a pilot and start your flight training.
Do You Really Want to Become a Pilot? Key Questions to Ask:
Open your note-keeping app or grab a pen and paper and answer these questions honestly:
- Can you trace how and when you developed this desire, i.e. wanting to become a pilot?
- If yes, then what was it? And how long has it been around?
- Do you think there are cons to becoming a pilot?
- If yes, what are they?
- If you find out that you are missing an essential skill needed to be a pilot, how much effort are you willing to put in to acquire it? Can it be more than 8 hours per week?
- If you joined flight school and found that the schedule requires studying Monday to Friday, nearly 10 hours per day, would you mind it? Or is that expected in your mind?
- If you have a job now, are you willing to sacrifice your life stability for instability for up to 3 years or more?
- Do you find yourself recently admiring many different jobs?
- If yes, do these jobs fall into the same category? (For example: Airline Pilot, Dispatcher, Astronaut, Flight Attendant—all fall into the Aviation/Aerospace category)
- Do you want to achieve many unrelated things in a short span? (For example: wanting to become a pilot, starting a business, doing a bachelor’s in Physics, travelling across Asia—all within the next seven years?)
- Do you have kids and a job?
- Do you know how to tie a tie? — A joke , but really… you should learn how to do it.
I’m not here to score your answers and determine your future through a screen, but rather to spark your brain and emotions to question and challenge your enthusiasm.
The purpose of these questions is to help you assess to what extent you are willing to sacrifice for your dream. How much effort are you ready to put in? Is that you are having a challenging period and based on that, yo are considering a career change? Has this intense feeling of wanting to become an airline pilot been around consistently for quite some time?
Four additional questions that are worth asking yourself:
- What if it didn’t work out?
- What if I couldn’t study?
- What if I found flying difficult?
- What if I couldn’t find a job?
What’s your backup plan for each of these scenarios?
This way, you can plan your future correctly and avoid falling into the unknown.
Essential Skills and Traits for Becoming a Pilot and Launching Your Career:
Like any other job in the world, there are skills and traits needed to get it done properly! And the same applies to a pilot job. In the following paragraphs, we will address some of the common questions:
- How should a pilot be?
- What does it take to become a pilot?
- What skills & traits do you need to become a pilot?
Before listing the skills and traits, it’s crucial to address one point. Since we are discussing you before even starting flight school, you don’t need to have all of the skills and qualities listed here to the highest degree; it’s enough to have the foundations.
Yes, it’s desirable to be a “natural”, but if you are willing to become a pilot, you will definitely manage to learn all of the skills and traits along your journey toward getting your pilot’s licence.
Here, we list the skills and traits needed to become a pilot:
1. Being Cooperative:
Remember that the cockpit is for two! Words like Crew Cooperation and Teamwork in Aviation are terms you will hear a lot throughout your pilot career.
These terms mean being a friendly person who is comfortable engaging with others. Not overly assertive; you actively listen and communicate your ideas clearly and efficiently.
Don’t be antisocial, arrogant, or individualistic.
2. Importance of quick Self-Learning for Pilots:
As a pilot, you always have to be self-learning. It’s common for the Flight Operations Department to give you a bunch of manuals, each 600 pages long or more, and expect you to absorb them quickly!
Even in flight school, especially if you are an integrated student. You must study and pass 14 heavy subjects in less than six months, you need to do plenty of self-studying on your own.
During simulators in your flight training, type rating, or the “practical training” phase in general, you need to know this critical fact:
Apart from the formal instruction you will receive (from your instructor/captain), you MUST always be learning independently.
Learn from your flight manuals, and mistakes. Observe and learn from the mistakes of your simulator partner, and quickly replace any wrong procedures or information in your mind with the correct ones!
Trust me, this trait is VERY IMPORTANT!
3. Time Management:
Having a sense of time is essential; organising it is crucial. As a pilot, you need to plan the amount of time given to you efficiently, whether it’s a 4-hour flight or a 45-minute one! There are tasks to be done. You should know when to do them and which ones take priority over others without overwhelming yourself. You don’t want to overload yourself with too many tasks in very little time because you will end up messing up every single one!
For example (talking to yourself):
“Okay, I have a 45-minute flight; I have paperwork to fill in the air usually, so on the ground, I will grab the necessary documents and write all that I can now (flight number, captain and first officer names, departure and arrival airports, etc.) and leave the rest for when I do my checks.
I’m flying this leg, so I don’t have much time. The airport I’m flying to usually gives us vectors (Directions), so our flight time might shorten. We take off; after reaching 10,000 feet, I’ll give control and do my checks as per my company’s procedures.
Once we hit our cruising level, get the ATIS as early as possible and prepare the arrival on the FMC” … and so on! You get the idea.
4. Stress Management:
I’m pretty sure no passenger would like to be informed that their pilot, who is responsible for their lives, is stressed!
Sure, we don’t live in a utopia; stress is unavoidable. As a pilot, it’s not that you shouldn’t be stressed at all, but you need to know how to manage it without letting it overwhelm you. Learn how to contain stress so it doesn’t affect your job. Keep the stress confined and away from the cockpit.
If you woke up and had an argument with your spouse, you have to keep it confined within the house. Once you leave, you switch to “Flying Mode”.
You might be thinking: “You shouldn’t fly if you’re stressed”. And to that, I would answer: “Outstanding airmanship!”
But if a standard argument with your spouse makes you so stressed that you can’t function, how are you supposed to handle the stress of an engine failure on take-off? That would likely paralyse you!
I agree that if you had a major argument or lost a loved one, the safest and most appropriate thing to do is not fly, of course!
Stress management means that your threshold for being overwhelmed should be higher than a standard person’s.
Even if you call your company’s crew rostering department and cancel your flight, you are creating more stress. You can’t keep calling in “stressed” and cancelling every time you argue with someone, as the company will ask for justification. If they observe that your stress handling is low, you’ll lose your job very soon and end up even MORE STRESSED!
5. The desire to learn more:
As a pilot, sometimes you’re given a thorough explanation of a particular phenomenon or system, but other times, it’s only a superficial explanation. Always be eager to know more!
Aviation touches on many fields from engineering to law, so be ready to dive deep into things you’ve never studied, such as how a specific plug on a seemingly ‘negligible’ system functions and why it works the way it does.
6. Humility:
And I’m not just referring to avoiding arrogance; you should also be honest with yourself. Don’t ever sit at any point in your career and say: “I’m done! I’m just too good!” even if you become a world-renowned examiner.
Always assess yourself, know your weaknesses, work on them, accept feedback, and learn from everyone, whether they are “above you” or “below you”.
Remember, there is NO SHOWING OFF in the cockpit. Safety comes before pride, so don’t hesitate for one second to give control to the other pilot if you feel the approach or a particular operation is too challenging for you!
Now that we’ve discussed what your character should be like as an airline pilot, the next part will cover the subject requirements to start studying, the necessary paperwork, and more.
By the way, if you actually read this far, it shows how passionate you are about wanting to fulfil your dream of becoming a pilot! Very well done!
References:
[1] Krogerus, M. and Tschäppeler, R., 2017. The Decision Book: 50 Models for Strategic Thinking. Profile Books, pp.78-81.
Link: https://profilebooks.com/work/the-decision-book
