I recently caught up my logbook in preparation for a New Zealand PPL validation, and I’m closing in on 16,000 hours. The country’s authorities also wanted to know my solo time—e.g., sole occupant of the aircraft. The number was surprisingly small, most from way back when I was a Part 135 freight dog. These days, all my work flying is multipilot, but even when puttering around in my Stinson 108, I’m usually accompanied by my wife or friends. I don’t mind flying alone, per say, but I do find it more rewarding when there’s someone with whom to share the experience.

In two decades at the airlines, I’ve come to appreciate that those I fly with really are one of the best parts of the job. Over the years, I’ve shared the flight deck with hundreds of pilots and enjoyed flying with almost all of them. Going through my logbook, I see so many familiar names—and some are still good friends. This is a small industry, and I have chance encounters with past colleagues all the time—in airplanes and airports, obviously, but also in crew vans and layover hotels and pilot-frequented bars, like Darwin’s Theory in Anchorage, Alaska, or Moose’s Saloon in Kalispell, Montana.

My last two airlines, Horizon Air and Compass, were small regional carriers, and it was pretty common to fly with the same person multiple times. This didn’t happen much during my first eight years with my current employer as we’re a huge airline of 17,000 pilots, and over that time I flew three aircraft types out of three large bases. Once I bid to the fairly small Seattle 737 base, though, I started occasionally flying with the same first officers, and it was nice to experience that familiar, small-airline vibe once again.

• READ MORE: Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air

One thing I haven’t done, until recently, is buddy-bid with anyone. This is the practice of coordinating your schedule bidding strategy with a pilot in your base to fly as many trips together as possible.

My good friend Brad Phillips, who I’ve written about here, buddy-bid the majority of his 11 years at Horizon Air with just two captains. I’ve also written about Joe and Margrit Fahan, a married couple at my airline who, prior to their joint retirement, buddy-bid international trips on the Airbus A330 together. Over the years, I’ve had trips where I really clicked with my counterpart and probably should have broached the idea of buddy-bidding but always figured that variety is the spice of life. Besides, doing so with any degree of success demands a good bit of seniority out of both parties, and until recently this is something I usually lacked.

But then in summer 2022, I flew with Steve Masek, and we went salmon fishing in Anchorage and had beers at Darwin’s and got along famously. We bid several more agreeable trips together, our wives met and gelled well, and Steve and Daniela gamely helped Dawn and I lay down 3,000 feet of PEX tubing the weekend before our hangar floor was poured. But then Masek got himself awarded a B737 captain slot, far below me on the list in that dark, dank corner where poor junior slobs are forced into reserve, red-eyes, and four-leg days. It was a dumb thing to do, but I’m thrilled for our junior FOs because Masek is a super guy and an excellent pilot.

Before his upgrade last fall, we buddy-bid one last long Anchorage overnight. We wet our lines in Ship Creek on a midnight rising tide, chomped cigars, and quaffed Woodford Reserve in the moonlight—and, alas, the salmon treated us to not even one solitary nibble.

• READ MORE: Part 2: Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air

By then I had already found Masek’s replacement, Heather Griffin. We flew a three-day trip together last July and quickly realized that we were going to be fast friends. Heather got her start flying skydivers and is a licensed skydiver herself, as am I. Griffin also flies paragliders, which is a goal of mine. She snowboards and I ski, we both sail, and we both ride dirt bikes.

On the last day of our trip, she realized that I’m the guy who writes for FLYING and used to live on a sailboat and spent years cruising the Caribbean, and she told me that she actually decided to pursue an airline career after her dad (also a pilot) showed her my columns as evidence that she could fly for a stuffy old airline and still live an unconventional, adventurous life. Aw, hell—with me, flattery will get you everywhere. Instant BFF.

Griffin and I were planning a flying, camping, and dirt-biking trip to Tieton State Airport (4S6) in the Cascades of Washington state for a few weeks hence, and she and her husband, Kevin, accepted our invitation to join. We had a great weekend, flying the Stinson at sunrise and sunset, riding Bethel Ridge in the mornings, splashing in Rimrock Lake during the sweltering afternoons, and talking around the campfire while millions of bright stars wheeled overhead. Dawn got to know Heather and liked her a lot.

Meanwhile, I developed a man-crush on Kevin, who’s as cool as his wife: an air ambulance pilot with a bunch of tailwheel time, a badass dirt bike rider, and a great storyteller with a wicked sense of humor and a colorful past as a Coast Guard flight mechanic, commercial fisherman, and Alaskan surf shop operator.

• READ MORE: Pilot Mental Health Remains the Last Taboo in Aviation

With the spouses properly introduced, Griffin and I started buddy-bidding. When the PBS window opens each month, we peruse the bid package and text back and forth, debating the merits of various trips and crafting a common strategy that will fit both of our plans. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. When the schedule assignments come out, we dig into the reasons report, figuring out what we did right and where we went wrong. As our trips together approach, we confer again to make layover plans: playing pinball in Raleigh, North Carolina, skydiving in Phoenix, roping up at an Anchorage climbing gym, or skiing at Lake Tahoe.

In cruise, shared interests fuel our conversations, and future adventures are a frequent topic. It didn’t take much to convince Heather and Kevin to join Dawn and I on an 11-day, 11-person dirt bike trip down Baja California in January. Griffin’s dad, Scott Condon, came too—and at 65 turned out to be the best and fastest rider of us all. It was a fantastic time with a wonderful group of friends, and we’re planning another big ride in the Pacific Northwest this summer.

In February, Heather and I got skunked, our buddy-bidding strategy foiled by pilots just senior to us. I flew with a bunch of great folks anyway—several of them brand-new to the airline—and had a lot of fun. March brought better luck. I’m about to fly a five-day trip with Griffin that includes a long Cozumel layover, and later on we have an easy four-day with 26 hours in Cabo San Lucas, where Dawn and Kevin will join us.

Most days, this is a really good job, and I frequently wonder at my good fortune. And then, when I thought my work life couldn’t get much better, I gained a good friend to fly with—and it did!

This column first appeared in the May 2024/Issue 948 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Finding That Right Pilot Buddy to Bid With appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Describing these two hours required three pages crammed with significantly more words than my usual monthly allotment, and yet I promised to cover the balance of the tour in a single additional installment.

Well, here goes nothing.

I won’t even attempt to adequately describe the remainder of the first day, which involved a lot of probing around the Fiordland’s misty maze of mountains and glacial valleys with several minimum-radius turnbacks from socked-in passes before finally finding a clear one that dropped us into perfectly named Doubtful Sound. When I finally landed ZK-WAX back in Wanaka, our home base for the week, I was thoroughly exhausted, exhilarated, and emotionally spent. It was the most visually intense day of flying in my life, not to mention a great deal more work than I’m used to putting in these days. A good cigar, glass of scotch, and eight full hours of sound sleep were in order.

• READ MORE: Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air

I was glad to find it wasn’t just me: Adam Broome, the North Carolinian piloting FlyInn’s other Cessna 172 (ZK-TRS) with his wife, Lissa, and FlyInn instructor Nick Taylor, confirmed that he was equally wiped out. And then McCaughan informed us that thanks to the weather window holding, we would be moving up our exploration of Mount Cook and the Southern Alps to the next day, never mind the wind forecast. This was akin to starting with the caviar and moving straight on to the crème brûlée—or perhaps more like competing in back-to-back Ironman triathlons.

The day began with calm winds, fair skies, and a short field approach into a 1,500-foot crop-duster’s strip in a cow pasture (very recently used, as I discovered soon after landing). From there we jaunted across to Lake Hawea and up the scenic Hunter River valley. The farther north we went, though, the windier and more turbulent it got.

At McCaughan’s urging, I moved farther and farther toward the downwind side of the valley until my right wing seemed to almost scrape the rocky slope— and then we were in a steady, powerful lift, riding the elevator upward at 1,500 feet per minute in relatively smooth air. My experience flying gliders came in handy, especially the bit of ridge soaring I’ve done. I became increasingly good at visualizing areas of lift and smooth air throughout our windy week and started to really enjoy surfing the ridges. Dawn, for her part, gamely endured the occasional solid thumping in the back seat, the price of admission for a whole week of world-class scenery.

• READ MORE: Pilot Mental Health Remains the Last Taboo in Aviation

Now climbing through 10,000 feet, the immense, icy form of the Mount Cook massif rose ahead. This was familiar territory, as we had camped and hiked in Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park the previous week. Mount Sefton, which had towered above our campsite in the moonlight and blazed in the morning alpenglow, slipped inconspicuously under our right wing. The Tasman, Hooker, Fox, and Franz Josef glaciers, whose gravel-strewn terminuses we had glimpsed from below, revealed themselves for the colossal blue giants they are, emerging from one enormous ice sheet draped around the shoulder of 12,218-foot Mount Cook. Climbers’ huts clinging to desolate rock ledges gave perspective to the landscape’s epic scale.

As Dawn and I gazed around, McCaughan sent a constant stream of radio position reports since flightseeing is popular here, and Mount Cook lies within a mandatory broadcast zone. There’s a standard circuit around the sights, but we were deviating to stay out of strong rotors downwind of the peaks. In any case, there weren’t too many sightseers braving the maelstrom, the conditions of which reminded me a bit of the long-ago winter I spent flying freight up California’s Owens Valley. The Southern Alps are a lot lower than the Sierra Nevada, though, and the winds aloft weren’t nearly as fearsome as during a West Coast frontal passage.

• READ MORE: On the ‘Bax’ Foot: A Lifelong Writer Tackles the Spoken Word

After landing for lunch at Glentanner, we headed west to Lake Ohau and started up the fertile, ranch-dotted Hopkins Valley. As we approached Mount Glenmary the wind started really kicking again. Turning up a side tributary, we surfed up the leeward slope to clear a low saddle under Mount Huxley then ducked into the calmer Ahuriri River drainage. Working our way south, beyond Lindis Pass we descended into a gorgeous, golden valley with green fields, farm buildings, and an airstrip at the bottom.

This is Geordie Hill Station, the 5,500- acre ranch where five generations of McCaughans have raised Merino sheep and beef cattle and where Matt and his wife, Jo, started FlyInn. Originally, guests stayed at the ranch. Now accommodations are in the lake resort town of Wanaka, a 10-minute flight west. Dawn and I came to really enjoy Wanaka, but I think we would have been equally happy staying in the beautiful, peaceful surroundings of Geordie Hill Station.

The next day, Matt McCaughan’s ranching duties took precedence, and we were paired with affable, experienced instructor Peter Hendriks for an overnight trip to the southeastern coastal city of Dunedin. The wind was still kicking, but at least lower terrain made for a less intense workout. From the central Otago crossroads of Cromwell we crossed into the Nevis River valley and followed it down to the verdant Southland Plains. We stopped at Mandeville’s pleasant little grass strip for lunch, checked out the Croydon Aviation Heritage Centre’s beautiful collection of vintage de Havilland aircraft, and made a quick flight with just Hendriks and I to complete the training requirements for my New Zealand PPL validation.

• WATCH: V1 Rotate: New Zealand by Air

Job done, Dawn clambered back into ZK-WAX and we headed south to the Catlins, a beautiful stretch of remote, craggy coastline straight out of western Ireland. We followed the wild coast northeastward, put in a good word with the controllers at Dunedin International Airport (NZDN), and landed at nontowered Taieri Airfield (NZTI). FlyInn put us up in a very nice hotel in central Dunedin, an atmospheric college town with a strong Scottish accent. Dawn and I had a good afternoon walkabout, then joined Hendriks, the Broomes, and Taylor for a lovely seafood dinner at an excellent restaurant tucked away by the seaport.

The next morning, we took a two-hour harbor cruise with local wildlife expert Rachel McGregor, spotting blue penguins, sea lions, and magnificent northern royal albatrosses at Taiaroa Head. A few hours later, we viewed the harbor from the air before heading up the coast to Oamaru and then inland via the Waitaki River and its series of impressive hydroelectric dams.

The weather window finally collapsed with a strong cold front bringing more wind, rain, and clouds than even a Kiwi pilot might care to tackle, giving us a Saturday off to poke around Otago wine country by car. Sunday dawned clear but windy, which we planned to mitigate by transiting Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu en route to Glenorchy. Queenstown Tower thought otherwise, given the steady stream of jets arriving down the Kawarau Gorge, so we were ordered to remain clear of controlled airspace. Alas, we bounced our way west across the mountains north of Queenstown, emerging from Monument Saddle to spiral down over the gravel-strewn Dart River on the way to landing on yet another beautiful grass runway.

After a ride into Glenorchy and a pub lunch, we headed back up the Dart River, this time via jet boat. It was a fun and beautiful journey, as the shallow draft and rapid speed took us 20 miles upriver into some rather gorgeous wilderness. It was well into the afternoon when we departed for the quick flight back to Wanaka, except there was so much interesting scenery that we dawdled and wandered, our track resembling a Family Circus cartoon. In particular, the spectacular Rob Roy Glacier near Mount Aspiring offered a perfect semicircular amphitheater to hang the flaps out and make a slow pass close inside the perimeter. ZK-TRS beat ZK-WAX back to the stable rather handily, and neither we nor Hendriks minded one bit.

Our last full day of flying circuited rural Otego, and I expected a fairly tame day out. McCaughan was back, his business with the spring lambs concluded, but he accompanied the Broomes while we nabbed Taylor, a very cheerful chap and laid-back instructor. After dropping in to visit the historic gold rush town of Clyde, we followed the popular Otago Central Rail Trail northeast to the Ida Valley and a little township called Oturehua. Now, Oturehua doesn’t have an airport, but there is a fairly level sheep paddock alongside the highway that Taylor assured me was fairly landable.

So much for a tame day out.

It seems the sheep had been absent for a few weeks as the grass was quite a bit taller than expected, but ZK-WAX handled lawn mower duties with aplomb. We visited 19th century farm-implement factory Hayes Engineering Works, with its fascinating water-powered, leather-belt-driven machine shop. Everything still works. The old-timer docent gamely powered up the shop and demonstrated use of the original lathe, press punch, shears, band saw, and more. After our visit, we enjoyed a beautiful flight surfing the ridges to Geordie Hill Station, where McCaughan gave us a longer tour, and Jo McCaughan cooked a fantastic lamb dinner. It was a really nice way to cap off our FlyInn experience.

We ended up moving our departure back by one day to do some more hiking near Wanaka and up around Rob Roy Glacier. The following morning we flew ZK-TRS to Queenstown to catch our airline flight home. True to form, New Zealand gave us a windier-and-cloudier-than forecast sendoff, with a slightly dicey ridge crossing and a good couple final thumps of turbulence.

I now hold a NZ PPL validation, which gives me solo privileges in New Zealand through June, should we care to return. We’re sorely tempted. My wife Dawn and I fell in love with the people, landscapes, and aviation scene in New Zealand, and I learned a great deal about mountain flying and NZ operations during our time with FlyInn.

If you have the time and money for a flying tour of New Zealand, I would highly recommend it. It’s a grand adventure, and a true bucket list experience.

This column first appeared in the April 2024/Issue 947 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Part 2: Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In this edition of V1 Rotate, FLYING contributor Sam Weigel chats with Ed Krause, who has been flying as an expat pilot in Asia for the past 16 years. Krause takes Weigel through the process of being hired at a startup regional airline in China, transitioning to business jets, and more. Learn how the expat pilot market is evolving, what the future may have in store, and ways to make yourself competitive for an overseas job.

The post Riding the Wave as an Expat Pilot in Asia appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

I’ve written about this process in broad terms before, but there is one aspect I would like to focus on: honing your ability to tell a good story and refining your repertoire of stories for interviews.

Most aviation interviews include a group chat that may include chief pilots, check airmen, recruiters, HR reps, line pilots, and perhaps even nonpilot employee representatives. This is commonly referred to as the panel interview, and for many pilots, it is the most stressful part, especially if the panel is large. Many of the questions during the panel interview take the form of, “Tell me about a time you…,” and you are expected to reply with a short illustrative anecdote from your career or life.

• READ MORE: Pilot Mental Health Remains the Last Taboo in Aviation

Some people were born with a natural gift of gab—many of us were not. That’s OK. You weren’t born with the natural ability to fly, either—you gained the skill the hard way, through learning, practice, and experience. Talking about yourself in a relaxed, authentic manner is a skill like any other. It can be taught, learned through trial and error—or for the lucky few, acquired by osmosis, by growing up around other good storytellers and subconsciously adopting their techniques. Most of us get better at it throughout our lives because we accumulate more interesting stories and tell them enough times to hone them well.

This isn’t something that you can pick up the night before your interview. If you’re only belatedly finding out about the panel interview and you have one next week, best arrange for a jam session with an aviation interview prep service, such as Cage Consulting or Emerald Coast. This isn’t a bad idea anyways, because most people are poor judges of how they sound and look to others.

Less expensively, but also less expertly, you can rope your friends or colleagues into being your practice audience and giving you feedback. This can be a fruitful (and FAA legal) use of free time in cruise flight. But if you’re shy and prefer to judge yourself, a GoPro or other camera set up on a tripod at eye level and 10 feet away will be brutally honest. The main thing is to make a conscious effort to practice. It’s best to start early.

• READ MORE: After a Training Fail, What Comes Next?

If you “got the gouge” for a particular employer’s interview, you’ll have an idea of what questions they may ask, but they’ll likely switch up things on occasion, and there’s a good chance you get at least one completely random question. Rather than focus on specific questions, you should develop a repertoire of stories concerning a broad range of events throughout your life and career.

Your stories should, whenever possible, be no longer than two or three minutes long. A good story will include a brief setup, a well-paced narrative, and a definitive conclusion. You should obviously avoid stories that paint you as a clueless lout, but they should show humility and growth. A bit of humor of the self-deprecating variety is often helpful. I’ve often joked that I never let the truth get in the way of a good story, but interview stories should be mostly true. Outright fabrications are usually glaringly obvious. Paring details for the sake of narrative and brevity, however, is both expected and necessary.

Often the panel’s questions are of a sort that could be seen as an invitation to talk about the deficiencies of former employers or coworkers (“Tell me about a time you disagreed with a supervisor.”) Don’t fall for this trap: Your overall tone should be positive and focus on your own actions, deficiencies, growth, and strengths. The last thing you want to show is simmering resentment. When a story necessarily involves a company or supervisor doing something underhanded, unsafe, or illegal, do not name them. On the other hand, liberally name mentors, coworkers, and supervisors who have been a positive influence. There’s a decent chance someone on the panel knows them.

• READ MORE: How Professional Pilots Can Survive Probationary Periods

Your stories shouldn’t all be aviation-related. Many of the questions won’t directly concern flying, and using anecdotes from your life outside of aviation can help demonstrate a wider variety of interests and talents. This can be particularly helpful when the panel includes nonpilots. In that case, you should also limit your technical jargon or include explanatory asides.

When telling your stories, try to appear relaxed even if you’re not, and try to sound like you haven’t rehearsed even though, ideally, you have. The trick is to write down only the outline, and then never tell the story exactly the same way twice. Pretend you’re telling it at a bar, and the next time at church, and the next time on a date. Use a timer and work out the ideal pacing. Try to eliminate “uhs” and “umms,” inserting pauses instead where needed. As you become more comfortable with a story, incorporate natural-feeling hand gestures, and use a camera to check your corresponding facial expressions.

Here are some sample questions to get you started at developing your repertoire of stories. I’ve included a version of a story I’ve told in several interviews as well, as an example.

• “Tell me about a time you helped a coworker.”
• “Tell me about a time you were interviewed and didn’t get hired for a job.”
• “Tell me about a time that a coworker made you uncomfortable.”
• “Tell me about a time you solved a difficult problem.”
• “Tell me about a time you felt out of your depth.”
• “Tell me about a time you failed a test or course.”
•  “Tell me about your proudest moment.”
• “Tell me about a time you broke a FAR.”
• “Tell me about a time you were uncomfortably low on fuel.”
• “Tell me about a time you declared an emergency.”
• “Tell me about a time you diverted to an alternate.”
• “Tell me about a time you thought the system was unfair.”
• “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a dispatcher (supervisor of flight, etc.).”
• “Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a [captain/first officer].”
• “Tell me about the best job you ever had.”
• “Tell me about a time you stayed at a job you disliked.”
• “Tell me about a time you witnessed sexual harassment/racial discrimination.”
• “Tell me about the best teacher you ever had.”
• “Tell me about a time the customer was wrong.”
• “Tell me about a time you went above and beyond.”
• “Tell me about a time you were scared.”
• “Tell me about a time you were fatigued.”
• “Tell me about a time you grounded an unairworthy airplane.”
• “Tell me about a time you were asked to do something illegal or unsafe.”

An example of my response: 

“Early in my career, I was flying canceled checks at a Part 135 company that’s no longer in business. They were sort of a mom-and-pop, fly-by-night operation, and they were nice people and tried hard, but you never knew if your next paycheck was going to clear. Anyways, late one night in Las Vegas, I had an electric fuel pump fail on a Piper Navajo, and, since that’s a nondeferrable item, I called my boss, who we’ll call Jim, at 2 a.m. I woke him up, and he was understandably grumpy, telling me to just open the fuel cross-feed, use the left electric fuel pump to start the right engine, and then press on to Burbank on the engine-driven pump.

“I thought about it for a second and realized, yes, that would work—but it was pretty severely illegal and would also leave me with a single point of failure in a heavy airplane over high terrain. I told Jim that and said I wasn’t willing to do it. He just growled, ‘Fine. Don’t move. I’ll be there in three hours,’ and hung up. 

“Sure enough, just as the sky is getting light, Jim roars up with another Navajo, gets out without a word, and starts tossing bags out of my plane. I join in and a few minutes later we’re panting next to a small mountain of bank bags and Jim just points at them, grunts, ‘Take those to Burbank,’ jumps in the broken Navajo, and blasts off. I was pretty shaken up. The whole way to Burbank, I was wondering if I just got myself fired. 

“The next day I came to work half expecting to be sent home, and I was kinda OK with that. I’d thought about it during the night and decided that no job was worth my life or my certificate and that I didn’t want to work for anyone who required me to put either at risk. The funny thing is, Jim greeted me cheerfully and didn’t say a single word about the incident. In fact, he never mentioned it again. I think once he calmed down and had some time to think about it, he realized he’d rather have a safety-conscious pilot than a risk-taker even if it was occasionally inconvenient. Since then, whenever I have to make a hard decision that I know might upset coworkers or supervisors, I think back to that night in Las Vegas.”

The post How to Ace an Airline Interview by Telling a Good Story appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Well, that obviously didn’t happen. The pandemic blew up everyone’s plans, and given the obvious jeopardy to my livelihood, the loss of our adventure barely registered. And then, as the world began to open back up, New Zealand stayed locked down longer than most. It wasn’t until Oshkosh 2022, when Dawn and I ran into Matt and Jo McCaughan at the FlyInn booth, that we dusted off our travel plans.

The McCaughans are friendly Kiwi sheep and cattle ranchers hailing from central Otago on the South Island, where they also run FlyInn, billed as “the authentic NZ self fly vacation.” They are also avid cruising sailors, which quickly became our main topic of conversation. Almost as an afterthought, we told them that while we’d be busy building our hangar/apartment for the 2022-23 season, we’d come fly with them in December 2023. Our revived New Zealand adventure would be our 20th wedding anniversary gift to each other.

We flew my airline from Seattle to Auckland on November 15, staying in New Zealand’s largest city for several days. On the 19th, our good friends Brad and Amber Phillips flew in, whereupon we rented a pair of campervans and headed south. The next two weeks would have been a pretty great vacation on their own. We spent six more days on the North Island, visiting the usual “must-dos” like Rotorua, Tongariro National Park, and Wellington as well as many more out-of-the-way locales.

Crossing the Cook Strait on a typically raucous ferry ride following a 40-knot blow, we spent another eight days road tripping through the South Island. We sampled excellent wine in Marlborough, tramped the fantastic coastal trail in Abel Tasman National Park, got rained on all down the wild West Coast, and set up camp in truly epic surroundings at Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park. All throughout, both the landscapes and climate frequently reminded us of the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, and Montana.

• READ MORE: Pilot Mental Health Remains the Last Taboo in Aviation

The roads were scenic and engaging, the locals exceptionally friendly and helpful, the cities few and far in between. This is a country slightly larger than the U.K. but with only 5 million people…and 75 million sheep.

In Christchurch we returned the campers and said goodbye to the Phillips, as their busy life back home precluded them from joining the flying tour—more’s the pity. Dawn and I took an Air New Zealand ATR-72 from Christchurch to Queenstown, New Zealand’s renown adventure tourism hot spot, which is where the FlyInn tour began the next day.

Soon after we landed, Jo McCaughan emailed to say that they were rejiggering the itinerary to go to Milford Sound and Fiordland on day one, thanks to a brief weather window. This made sense. All throughout our travels, the weather had been exceptionally variable, with low ceilings and pouring rain as well as bright sunshine being encountered more days than not. It was clear that flying in New Zealand requires a fair amount of flexibility. Still, from what little I knew of Milford Sound, I got the impression that I was being thrown right into the deep end, sink or swim.

At the airport the next morning, we were joined by Matt McCaughan, longtime FlyInn instructor Nick Taylor, and North Carolinian couple Adam and Lissa Broome, our counterparts for the next eight days. McCaughan and Taylor introduced us to our rides for the week, two 180 hp Cessna 172s, registrations ZK-TRS and ZK-WAX.

For safety purposes FlyInn tends to keep the airplanes together, so we got to know the Broomes over the course of the tour. Notably, Adam circumnavigated the globe with his Beech Bonanza in 2016, making for some very interesting stories.

Dawn and I drew the eye-catching, yellow-and-blue ZK-WAX for the week and started with Matt as instructor. We began with a short hop up to Wanaka, FlyInn’s base of operations, for a coffee and chat. Sufficiently briefed, we departed to the northwest over the serrated, deep-blue ribbon of Lake Wanaka and climbed to circle striking, glacier-draped Mount Aspiring, “The Matterhorn of the South.”

• READ MORE: On the ‘Bax’ Foot: A Lifelong Writer Tackles the Spoken Word

Beyond its peak, the weather turned significantly cloudier than forecast—no big surprise there. We flew over the top for a bit, found a good hole, dropped into a wide, verdant valley, and followed the glacial, gravel-strewn Pyke River to the appropriately named Big Bay. After making a good inspection pass and landing on the broad, dark-sand beach, we went for a tramp a short way inland, where there’s a hiker’s hut and seasonal fish camp. This is a good week’s hardy walk from the nearest road, and all resupply is done via beach landing.

We soon departed over the crashing surf and turned out to sea, making our way south around a series of cloud-choked headlands. Matt duly noted St. Anne’s Point straight ahead, and then Dale Point to our left, our cue to turn into the rain-soaked entrance to world-famous Milford Sound. It looked VFR—only just. Matt noted there would likely be sunshine (albeit with a lot of wind) at the head of the fjord. I proceeded in, keeping my right wing hard against the northern wall of the gorge at Matt’s urging—the better to turn around if his promised good weather didn’t materialize. But it did, along with rainbows and a couple dozen waterfalls and steaming tourist cruise boats. It was a truly magnificent sight.

And then came the wind, streaking the head of the fjord with long ribbons of spume and giving our little 172 a good bashing. Unperturbed, Matt kept up his litany of mandatory radio position reports. I was glad he was there since it was challenging enough just flying. I turned up the Cleddau River valley and began my letdown, reversing course at a wide fork in the river to make a modified dogleg final to Runway 29 at Milford Sound Airport (NZMF).

The sea breeze was gusting at 30 knots. My landing was not pretty. It was safe and acceptable, that’s all. A short taxi later, we shut down in the shadow of a dozen tour operators’ Grand Caravans, Airvans, and Kodiaks. With the steep rock walls and silvery cascades of Milford Sound as a majestic background, it would’ve made the world’s best “Learn to Fly!” poster.

As we ate lunch, I reflected on a few things. First, Kiwi pilots appear to be pretty comfortable in marginal VFR (IFR not being very common here). Strong local knowledge of weather and terrain helps mitigate the risk, as does observing a few rules of thumb that closely mirror those that my old-school first CFI taught me as “the right way to scud-run.”

Second, there’s a lot of trust in the engine—though, admittedly, a lot of the valley floors are probably survivable in case of forced landing, with fairly stunted bush and plentiful gravel bars on the rivers.

Thirdly, the high density of world-class scenery coupled with a highly developed tourist industry make much of the New Zealand backcountry far more air-trafficked than comparable sites in the U.S., with accordingly more rigid procedures despite a relative lack of ATC facilities.

This would be a tough place for the uninitiated to go it alone—thus the appeal of an operation like FlyInn.

Departing into the maelstrom once more, we climbed over Milford Sound and ducked into the relative calm of the Arthur River valley. This impossibly scenic, waterfall-laced, glacier-carved hanging valley, traversed by the famed Milford Track, perfectly frames the 2,000-foot cascade at its head, Sutherland Falls, once thought to be the world’s tallest. It pours from what appeared to be a neat rock-walled thimble of a tarn, Lake Quill.

“Want to fly around it?” asked Matt with a wry grin. He knew I’d think this was a crazy idea, and at first glance I did. “There’s more room than it looks,” Matt said. “Just put out 20 degrees of flaps and slow to 65 knots.”

So I did, and it was absolutely spectacular, one of the neatest things I’ve done in an airplane. Once we completed our circuit, we dove out of the thimble and ZK-TRS buzzed in, and as I watched them my perspective suddenly shifted, revealing the epic scale of the landscape we were exploring. The effect was magical.

I’ve described the memorable first two hours of a weeklong tour in New Zealand, and I think everything we saw could fill a year’s worth of columns. I’ll content myself with two, cramming the balance into next month’s contribution. In the meantime, by the time you read this, my special V1 Rotate video episode, “New Zealand By Air,” should be live on FLYING’s website.

We recorded some 500 gigabytes of footage, much of it spectacular, and editing it down to 15 minutes proved to be a real challenge. There are worse problems to have.

This column first appeared in the March 2024/Issue 946 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Exploring New Zealand’s Grand Islands by Air appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In this edition of V1 Rotate, FLYING contributor Sam Weigel brings us on a cross-country flight to Northern California and discusses what it all means and what you can expect going forward.

• READ MORE: How Professional Pilots Can Survive Probationary Periods

The post Is This the End of the Pilot Shortage? appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Most certainly you still remember it—particularly for the salacious detail that said pilot had partaken in psychedelic mushrooms 40-some hours before his ill-timed psychotic episode. Already, “Had any ’shrooms lately, cap’n?” has supplanted the long-standing “Been drinking lately, cap’n?” as a moronic joke of choice among our more comedically impaired passengers. For much of our empathy-deficient, terminally online general public, a sad case of crumbling mental health that destroyed a family man’s life is little more than darkly humorous grist for the dank meme mills.

To those of us who make our living as professional pilots, though, and to others in this industry for which safety is religion but discussions of mental health have remained frustratingly taboo, this felt like something much more serious, another foreshock to an earthquake that’s been decades in the making.

This event hit particularly close to home for me because the pilot in question and I crossed paths when we both flew for Horizon Air. The name didn’t ring a bell until Horizon friends sent me photos from back in the day: “Oh, that Joe!” Furthermore, I flew several times with the quick-acting captain who subdued the renegade jumpseater, and after leaving Horizon I ran into him on a layover. It’s a very small industry.

It’s rare that intentional pilot actions cause accidents or serious incidents like this one—but not unknown. The most infamous is 2015’s GermanWings 9525, which was an open-and-shut case of pilot murder-suicide. Most are not so clear. EgyptAir 990 and SilkAir 185 were ruled suicides by the National Transporation Safety Board (NTSB) but are still disputed by Egyptian and Indonesian authorities, respectively. It’s the leading theory for the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia 370 but is unlikely to be proven absent recovery of the wreckage and black boxes. The final report on 2022’s China Eastern 5735 crash has yet to be issued, but media sources report that investigators believe it resulted from intentional action by one of the pilots.

• READ MORE: On the ‘Bax’ Foot: A Lifelong Writer Tackles the Spoken Word

At a time when every other facet of airline flying has become astonishingly safe, these events have started to stick out. Just as Air France 447, Colgan 3407, and other loss-of-control accidents prompted aviation regulators to ask, “Are airline pilots forgetting how to fly?” now mental health events—including many that go unpublicized because they involve pilots on layover or at home—are prompting industry leaders to ask, “Are airline pilots mentally well enough to fly?” To which the more cynical among us respond smartly: “Sure we are— just ask us!”

Because that’s essentially the system that is in place. Every six or 12 months, we fill out FAA Form 8500-8 (Application for Airman Medical Certificate) and state whether we have ever in our lives been diagnosed with, had, or presently have any one of 23 potentially disqualifying conditions, notably including “mental disorders of any sort; depression, anxiety, etc.” It is well known that checking yes to this box will shunt your application into an opaque, byzantine process involving significant time and expense for evaluations and interminable delay by the FAA’s understaffed Aerospace Medical Certification Division (AAM-300), and that after a year or two in limbo, you may be brusquely informed that you are not fit to fly for pleasure or profit.

Additionally, you are required to list all visits to health professionals in the last three years, and listing anyone even nominally connected with the health of your noggin is most certain to invite additional questions.

If your healthcare was provided by the Department of Defense or Veterans Affairs, there’s no hiding anything. The FAA has access to your records. The rest of us are on the honor system. Most of us are truthful, particularly for physical defects (Crohn’s disease, in my case, for which there is a fairly easy, well-known special issuance process). The system, however, definitely incentivizes concealing mental issues. I have personally encountered three major airline pilots who openly told me they have diagnoses of anxiety or depression that they’ve kept hidden from the FAA and the airline. I’m sure I’ve flown with others who keep their cards closer to their chests.

But they are the exceptions. Most of us don’t hide mental conditions from the FAA because most of us have nothing to hide—and we make damned sure it stays that way by never getting within speaking distance of anyone qualified to make any sort of troublesome diagnosis. Mind you, pilots already tend to be the sort of folks who deny the possibility of any human weakness in their mettle, who tough it out and rub some dirt on it and grit their teeth while shoving the pain deep, deep down. When it comes to mental or emotional health, this innate reluctance to seek help is greatly reinforced by the professional consequences of doing so.

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And so, for the vast majority of working pilots, mental healthcare simply does not exist. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, companies have invested in wellness resources for their employees, and my airline has been at the forefront. A while back, I flew with a new first officer who was feeling stressed over her personal finances and, seeing a blurb on our internal website for wellness coaching, thought, “Why not? It’d be nice to talk to someone about this.” That lasted for about two minutes before she was informed that, because of aeromedical-legal issues, the program was not available to pilots. Instead, we commiserate over layover beers—the only acceptable form of therapy available to us.

I’ve previously written about my experience moving off of Windbird and across the country to Seattle, sleeping in my own bed for three nights in a busy, 60-day period, and how I was in a rather dark place mentally. This raised some eyebrows, and I received several emails expressing concern—not over my mental health but regarding my honesty about it in print. The reality is that I was not suffering from depression, and I never have. But there have been periods in my life where financial, career, or life stress clouded my usual optimistic disposition, and friends and family noticed. The fact that it is considered taboo for a professional pilot to admit even this is disheartening.

We are apparently expected to be superheroes, or to at least play the part. What of those whose internal struggles greatly eclipse my own? Most suffer in silence, and every year we lose a few of these, the company email announcing their untimely passing with no reference to cause of death. A brave few seek professional help, either on the sly or at great risk to their career.

And then there are those who take the DIY approach. There is a significant body of recent clinical research to suggest that Psilocybin is effective in many individuals for treating anxiety and affective disorders. It’s now legal in several states and tolerated in others. Why wouldn’t a depressed person who has denied themselves professional treatment give magic mushrooms a try?

Alas, amateur dosing in a less-than-clinical setting will yield uneven results, and there may be unexpected side effects, notably including insomnia. I’m sure most of us believe we’d never attempt to gain access to an airline cockpit after several days without sleep—but few of us really know what we’d do in that state.

Industry leaders know there’s a problem. The FAA knows there’s a problem, having recently established a Mental Health and Aviation Medical Clearances Rulemaking Committee, which will be advisory but is expected to recommend major changes. There have been some small tweaks already, such as expedited approval of those with a childhood diagnosis of ADHD but no recent history.

But our industry and regulators have a great deal of institutional momentum and a fair amount of outdated thinking about mental health to overcome. It is my sincere hope that the recent Horizon Air incident provides the impetus and political cover required for our leaders to make the sea change that our system so very badly needs.

This column first appeared in the January-February 2024/Issue 945 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post Pilot Mental Health Remains the Last Taboo in Aviation appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Before COVID-19 and for a bit afterward, there was a real shortage of qualified regional applicants—to the extent that many pilot groups saw raises of 100 percent or more. And there was a great deal of pressure to push new hires through training and onto the line.

I have friends who were simulator instructors and check airmen during that time, and they have stories of struggling applicants being afforded extra training sessions, multiple check ride attempts, and double or even triple the normal amount of initial operating experience (IOE) in an attempt to get them through.

• READ MORE: On the ‘Bax’ Foot: A Lifelong Writer Tackles the Spoken Word

But lately all the regional airlines have plenty of qualified first officers and even more qualified new-hire applicants—it’s qualified captains they are short on. It has become increasingly difficult to receive an interview at 15,00 hours. 

Jonathan Ornstein, Mesa Airlines’ longtime CEO, recently revealed that the company has more than 2,000 apparently qualified applications on file, all competing for a relative handful of new-hire slots. Thus, there’s no real pressure to hold new hires’ hands through training. In fact, the incentive goes the other way. The regionals need first officers who can pass captain upgrade training and IOE as soon as they’re legal to do so. It makes financial sense to winnow any that struggle as soon as possible. Brutal, but understandable.

One of the largest regionals has reportedly gone to a “two-and-through” policy. You are given one “freebie”—be that a check ride bust, training event repeat, or even extra preparatory sim session. The second one results in automatic training failure and termination. 

A friend was caught by this policy when his training partner, an older career changer, struggled and was offered “refresher” sessions before two check rides. My friend wanted to help his training partner and served as seat support for both sessions, only to have them counted against his own record, with summary termination the result. He now has an airline training failure as a permanent stain on his Pilot Records Improvement Act (PRIA) file.

This should indicate how seriously you need to treat airline training. You are not particularly needed at the regional airlines now. Training is not a gimme, nobody will hold your hand, and if you do struggle, you cannot expect much sympathy or flexibility. Compared to primary and secondary instruction, most airline training is much less spoon fed—the onus is generally on you to study, show up with the answers, and shine in the sim.

• READ MORE: How Professional Pilots Can Survive Probationary Periods

If you suffer from check ride nerves, best find a way to calm them now. To be a professional pilot is to be a professional check ride taker. I would suggest that before even applying for the regional airlines right now, you should have total confidence in your ability to make it through a fast-paced, unforgiving training program.

That said, anyone can have a bad day. You might have shown up prepared, studied hard, done everything right—and still messed up. Maybe that got you rattled and affected your  performance, especially knowing that your job—your career, even—was on the line. I’ve never trained under that kind of pressure and can’t say for sure I’d handle it well. Perhaps you didn’t, and now you too have an airline training failure in your PRIA file.

What now?

First, you need to know that your life is not over and neither is your career. There are plenty of pilots working with a training failure somewhere in their past. Having this on your record is less concerning than being fired from a job for cause, aircraft accident, or FAA enforcement action, DUI/DWI, or losing your medical. You still have the same flight time and certifications that you had before the failure. I’ve never heard of the FAA suspending or revoking certificates, or even giving a 709 check ride, based on someone failing out of an airline training program. You can still make a living flying airplanes.

• READ MORE: Allure of International Flying Lies Across the Glittering Sea

The course of your career has changed, though. I’d argue that the “training/CFI/regional/major in five years” rocket ship career path was already becoming unrealistic as the pilot shortage wound down, but in any case, that gate is shut now. Its closing was always a possibility in this industry—perhaps even a probability. It slammed shut for every pilot of my generation when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, and yet, as dark as things seemed for a while, many went on to have wonderful careers. My own career path took turns I never saw coming, and they led to some really interesting experiences and lifelong friends. I wouldn’t go back and change anything, even if I could.

In their current hiring mood, the airlines will likely not take a chance on you while your training failure is fresh. Your mission now is to build a record that puts your failure squarely in the past and shows that it was a one-off event. Take whatever time you need to get your head right, then jump right back into it. Get yourself into a position to pass a check ride as soon as possible.

If you’re going back to flight instructing, add that CFII or MEI rating. If you can land a Part 135 gig, better yet—it will require passing an approved training program and a 135.293 proficiency check, plus potentially a type ride depending on the aircraft. Most corporate gigs also involve a type ride. If nobody is calling just yet, a single-engine sea or glider rating can be added to a commercial certificate fairly cheaply. Just get back on that horse and pass a check ride.

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I don’t normally advocate job hopping, and it can be a red flag to HR departments. But I will say that following a training program failure, you’ll need to go through two or three full training programs without incident to become competitive for a top-tier job. If you can do that with a single employer, fine. Move up to a different airframe as soon as you can. If you need to switch employers to pass another training program, do so after a decent interval.

No matter where you go, you’ll need to disclose the training failure on each application, and it will likely come up on every interview. Depending on how you handle it, this can become your biggest stumbling block or an unexpected asset. It is so important that you do not play the blame game. Regardless of what actually happened, you need to develop a credible explanation of why you weren’t ready, what you got wrong, what you learned from the experience, and how you are better equipped now to pass a tough training course.

Unfortunately, you’re in a poor position to judge whether your explanation is actually any good. This is where paying an interview prep company can be extremely valuable, especially if you’ve worked your way back to applying for a top-tier position. With some polishing and a solid post-failure history to support it, the tale of how your lowest moment turned you into a better person, and a better pilot, could just be the exact thing that eventually lands you that dream job.

The post After a Training Fail, What Comes Next? appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

I’ve subscribed to this venerable periodical since my early teens and read it in the local library for a few years before that. I’d peruse the news and gawp at the air-to-air photos and soak up every word of the articles, but first I’d head straight to the columns, for it was there that my love of aviation and appreciation of good writing were most equally rewarded. My two favorites were Len Morgan’s “Vectors” and Gordon Baxter’s “Bax Seat.” Morgan was everything I wanted to be, with the fortune of having been born in a more interesting age. There was such grace and poignancy to his writing, infused with the wisdom of a long life well lived, and a little sadness as well, for his more interesting age was one in which an aviator regularly lost compatriots he called friends.

But my favorite personality in the old FLYING was Gordon Baxter. “Bax” wasn’t so much a pilot as he was a character, and he was very upfront about that. His columns were full of his foibles and inadequacies as an aviator, as well as various hijinks that made me wonder how he ever evaded the steely gaze of the FAA and various designated examiners. (Martha Lunken is his spiritual—and literal—successor. Somewhere Bax is looking down—or up—and thanking the controlling deity that he predated webcams.)

By the time I started reading him, Bax had grounded himself because of recurring seizures and only occasionally took flight with other pilots. But, in his own exaggeratedly down-home Texas fashion, Bax was able to convey, in a way few others could, everything that people like you and I find wonderful, magical, and captivating about flight, airplanes, and aviators.

• READ MORE: Allure of International Flying Lies Across the Glittering Sea

I think the other reason I liked Bax was that he so clearly had the gift of gab, something I decidedly lacked at that self-conscious age. Long before he wrote for FLYING (and Car and Driver), and even before he started writing for local newspapers, Bax was a well-known radio personality in Southeast Texas, famous since 1945 for his madcap style and on-air antics. He frequently moved stations, being fired each time “for the same reason they hired me. I’m Gordon Baxter, and there’s no cure for that.” Later he spent a fair amount of time on the speaking circuit, and he wrote about that too. He drove around the South to spin a couple hours of folksy humor to perfect strangers eating rubber chicken—they loving him, and he loving them right back. As a bookish, introverted teenager with a slight speech impediment, that sort of easy volubility awed me, and I was a bit jealous of it. Still am.

I’ve loved words from an early age, but for me they were things to be considered and weighed, massaged and delivered to the world in my own good time. By my teens I knew my strengths and weaknesses fairly well, and I counted writing among the former and speaking as one of the latter. Like most people, I’ve always tried to lead publicly with my strengths while privately working on my shortcomings. These included my lack of ability in practical matters (so I worked on my own vehicles, cruised aboard and maintained Windbird, and built our hangar-apartment) and my natural aversion to pain, discomfort, and risk (so I ski, motorcycle, dirt-bike, and

skydive). In my late teens, I made a conscious effort to come out of my shell and talk to people even when it was uncomfortable, and as I’ve aged, I’ve become increasingly extroverted and comfortable in my own skin. Dawn scoffs when I describe myself as an introvert, noting with some exasperation that “you’ll talk till the cows come home!” She’s not wrong. It helps that I’ve accumulated a pretty good cache of funny and/or interesting stories (some of them even true!) as I’ve traveled the world and embarked on various adventures. I love hearing a good story, and I enjoy telling one.

That said, I haven’t gone out of my way to seek out public speaking opportunities. The only one I’ve accepted until now, at the abortive ModAero aviation/music festival, ended up being somewhat disastrous, insomuch as I poured myself into preparation for a presentation that ended up being attended by all of four people (Taking Wing, June 2016). More recently, my videos for FLYING’s V1 Rotate web series have forced me, for the first time, to really hone my delivery. Seeing yourself in high-definition video is the most brutally honest form of feedback you’ll ever get. Making the videos has improved my pacing and rhythm of my intonations, cleaned up my enunciation, made me more conscious of my posture and facial expressions, and prompted me to become more liberal with gestures. It has actually changed my speaking to more closely mirror my writing. Fortunately, I’m usually filming myself and have the luxury of virtually unlimited takes—because a lot of takes have sometimes been required to get it right!

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So when Larry Buerk from EAA Chapter 818 emailed me with an invitation to speak at its meeting, I decided the time was right to take the leap. As a longtime EAA member (and a product of the Young Eagles program), these are folks I’m comfortable around. It’s about as low stress of an environment as I could wish for my debut. Indeed, once we land at Skagit, head inside the terminal, and start meeting folks, the nerves mostly subside. After an hour of chapter business and another guest, it’s my turn to speak. I cue up the accompanying photo presentation and begin my lecture on “Creating an Aviation Homestead in the Pacific Northwest.”

Buerk films the entire thing for the chapter’s YouTube channel, where you can find it if you’re so inclined. I’m pretty stiff at the beginning, hands drawn toward the lectern and eyes toward my laptop screen. As the presentation proceeds, though, my body language opens up considerably. I do a better job of maintaining eye contact and using gestures. The audience of 25 or 30 is agreeably engaged, laughing at my jokes and periodically interjecting pertinent remarks and questions. The interruptions to rehearsed flow actually help me loosen up. I speak extemporaneously at some length in response to questions. The members give me a nice round of applause afterward and stick around to chat and give Piper a scratch behind the ears. It’s a really nice experience.

Does my humble little presentation for a local EAA chapter mark the launch of a second (ahem, third or fourth) career touring the rubber-chicken speaking circuit, like our ole pal Bax? Probably not! That said, having faced a lifelong bugaboo and coming away without embarrassing myself and even enjoying the experience, I do think I’d like to stretch myself with a few more speaking gigs and see if I can’t get better with a bit more practice. If you’re desperate and need a freebie speaker to fill time at your EAA chapter, flying club, or airport association meeting, well, I’m a sucker for all those types of events and can probably be talked into all sorts of foolishness. Drop me a line and lure me in. I’m particularly susceptible to hints about rides in cool, old airplanes.

This column first appeared in the December 2023/Issue 944 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post On the ‘Bax’ Foot: A Lifelong Writer Tackles the Spoken Word appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

• READ MORE: Financing the Pro Pilot Dream…Without Getting Scammed

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