Elite and specialized

According to the FAA there are approximately three-quarters of a million pilots in the United States.

Nearly a third of those are student pilots. Beginners. Folks who have the desire to fly recreationally or professionally but haven’t yet reached the stage where they can jump into an aircraft and fly at will.

That is something to be excited about and something that causes me a bit of concern.

I’m excited, and I suspect you should be too, because the number of pilots is on the upswing. Only a few short years ago there were fewer than 600,000 of us. Now, that number is swelling rapidly. A sizeable segment of the wider population has discovered aviation.

Thankfully, an increasingly large number of non-pilots are beginning to see themselves living a bigger, bolder, more adventurous life — a goal they can satisfy by plunking themselves down in the left seat and getting comfortable there.

That’s good news. But it isn’t an entirely accurate portrayal of what’s happening. It’s a snapshot, but not an all-inclusive picture of the situation.

A closer look at the numbers reveals something peculiar. There are more than twice as many student pilots today as there were a decade ago. Those students represent the full increase in pilot numbers plus a few. That’s where my concern comes in.

While the total number of pilots is up over the past decade, and it’s up by a lot, the number of pilots who are not students has decreased. The number is only slightly down, but a smaller number of pilots is not what our economy needs right now. If not for a tsunami of new pilot trainees, the number of pilots in the U.S. would be on the decline. That’s not good.

Let’s not despair, however. Within these ranks of pilots that span a wide spectrum from student to Airline Transport Pilot with so many stops in between, there is an enormous amount of specialization. So much so that the word “pilot” becomes little more than a broad category that suggests an industry more than it explains what a given individual does.

Pilot as a job title is now very much on a par with “doctor.” Not in the educational sense, of course. Doctors have to clear a pretty high bar on that front. But in terms of specialization and diversification there are parallels between the two certifications.

My friends Ashish, James, and Maury are all doctors. However, they spend their days doing very different procedures on a wildly divergent set of patients. Ashish is in general practice. James is a podiatrist. Maury earns his daily bread as an orthopedic surgeon. The term “doctor” is merely a rough description of their profession, not a specific explanation of what they do.

Pilots have wandered into a similar situation in recent years.

In recent months I’ve flown with Sam, Seth, and Dennis. In each case we flew together in a fabric covered cage made of steel tubing. The aircraft we flew were powered by relatively small engines running 100LL fuel. Same, same, same.

Dennis used to be an airline pilot. He’s retired now and so he tends to fly single-engine machines of various horsepower. He owns airplanes that land on runways or water.

Seth, on the other hand, flies helicopters for a law enforcement division for a major city in the Northeast. While Dennis needs 1,000 feet or more of runway to takeoff or land — and when he was flying airliners he needed many times that distance — Seth needs little more than an open parking lot or a flat roof on a high-rise building.

Sam is a pilot, too. A good one. However, Sam flies what could be described as a pseudo-satellite. An aircraft that likes being at 60,000 feet, cruising at less than 20 mph. Unlike the aircraft Seth and Dennis and I fly, Sam’s aircraft can stay aloft for months at a time. One very unusual part of Sam’s flight experience is that he never actually leaves the ground while flying. He is comfortably seated in a ground-based facility in a cockpit that looks remarkably like a desktop simulator. Only the aircraft lifts off, but both he and the aircraft fly.

Ultimately, this is where I find encouragement in the numbers. For while some of us will seek out the massive paychecks found at the airlines, others will focus on flying helicopters as emergency responders or to deliver workers to offshore oil rigs. More than a few of us will choose to fly Part 91 for private owners and businesses, while others will fly drones that deliver packages for the local drug store or monitor atmospheric gases in the thin air of the stratosphere.

And some of us, those who find a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction from helping others acquire the skills to do any of those things, will be found serving as flight instructors. A good percentage of those who do this work will be on the younger side, headed for the airlines, or the military, or the luxurious rides carrying the well-to-do from here to there.

More than a few will be of the sort who are just happy doing the work for its own sake. Folks like me who aren’t trying to climb the ladder to a higher rung. From our perspective, we’re already at the top of the ladder. Because we get to fly with folks like Sam, and Seth, and Dennis.

For a pilot, no matter what our specialization might be, we tend to believe we’ve got a pretty good deal. Because we do. And that’s often true, even though being a pilot means something different to each of us.