🎂 May 2025 · Turned 35. My sister's birthday gift: a 30-minute 'discovery flight' voucher she expected me to use once and frame. Strategic error on her part.
Getting my pilot's license at 35
✈️ May 24, 2025 · The discovery flight. The instructor let me hold the controls over the bay and said 'you have the airplane.' Three words, total rewiring of a life plan.
📋 Jun 2025 · Did the sensible math: ~60 hours of instruction, a written exam, a medical, and a number with more digits than I'd hoped. Opened a savings account named WINGS. Told nobody yet.
🩺 Jun 2025 · Aviation medical passed. The doctor asked why now. Best answer I had: 'because 40-year-old me will ask why not then.'
📚 Jul 2025 · Ground school begins. My evenings now belong to airspace classes, weather theory, and a plastic flight computer from the 1970s that pilots swear by. They're right, annoyingly.
🛫 Jul 12, 2025 · Lesson one in a Cessna 152 older than I am. Takeoff: exhilarating. Straight-and-level flight: apparently a lifelong pursuit. My altitude wandered like a toddler.
🔁 Aug 2025 · Circuits, circuits, circuits. Takeoff, climb, turn, descend, land, again. My landings described by my instructor, generously: 'arrivals.'
💥 Aug 2025 · The plateau: lesson nine, landings getting WORSE. Sat in the car after and questioned everything. Instructor's note in my logbook that day: 'normal. keep going.'
🌤️ Sep 6, 2025 · It clicked. Flare, hold, hold, squeak. A landing so smooth the instructor slow-clapped. Grinned for approximately 72 hours.
🦅 Sep 20, 2025 · FIRST SOLO. The instructor stepped out — 'three circuits, I'll be watching' — and shut the door. The empty right seat is the loudest silence there is. Shirt-tail cut per tradition.
📝 Oct 2025 · Written exam: 60 questions on everything from cloud types to right-of-way rules. Passed with 88%. The two wrong answers haunt me still (magnetic compass errors, my nemesis).
🧭 Nov 2025 · Navigation: flying to places on purpose. First cross-country — three towns, a paper chart, a stopwatch, and the discovery that highways from 3,500 feet are the best map ever made.
🌬️ Dec 2025 · Crosswind month. Learned to land sideways-ish in winds that cancel beach days. Also learned the most important pilot skill: saying 'not today' and driving home.
❄️ Jan 2026 · Weather cancellations: 5 of 8 lessons. Used the ground time for radio practice. I can now say 'niner' without feeling ridiculous. Mostly.
🗺️ Feb 14, 2026 · SOLO cross-country: 150 nautical miles, two strange airfields, one wrong radio call that ATC kindly untangled. Landed home at golden hour. Logbook entry underlined twice.
📈 Mar 2026 · Polish phase: steep turns, stalls, simulated engine failures. My instructor's calm 'and where would you land NOW?' is permanently installed in my brain.
😰 Apr 2026 · Mock checkride with a different instructor. Verdict: 'you fly fine, stop narrating your doubts out loud.' Fair.
🎯 May 9, 2026 · CHECKRIDE. Two hours of oral quizzing, then flying with an examiner who says almost nothing. Back on the ground, he extended a hand: 'Congratulations, pilot.'
📜 May 2026 · The license arrived — a plastic card that weighs nothing and cost a year of weekends, a small fortune, and one entire personality. Worth every unit of all three.
👩 May 17, 2026 · First passenger: the sister who bought the voucher. Flew her over the bay where it started. She cried. I flew the plane and saved mine for the ground.
🌍 Next · Building hours, one $100 hamburger at a time. Someday: mountains, floatplanes, maybe an instrument rating. The sky turned out to be less a ceiling, more a door.