www.PSFmagazine.com | November-December 2019 | 41 40 | November-December 2019 | Powered Sport Flying How Special Are Pilots? How many people do you know? How many of those people are pilots? My guess is that since you are interested in aviation, a pretty good percentage of the people you know are pilots. And when I say “pretty good percentage” I’m saying not over 5%. Conversely, my guess is that there are a lot of people living in this country who don’t even know one pilot. Compare that to how many people you know who can drive a car. Two out of three people have a driver’s license. That doesn’t include those people who can drive a car or at least know how to drive a car, but have lost their license for some reason. (You know, incarceration, drunk driving, handicaps, old age… all the things I hope to avoid.) In fact, I suspect that you would have to think awhile before you could come up with the name of an adult you know who doesn’t know how to drive a car and has never driven a car. Driving is just that common. A few years ago I decided to try to figure out what percentage of people in the United States were faa licensed pilots. Thanks to the faa.gov web site, that number isn’t a hard number to find. And it really is a small number. So how many people do you think have a pilot’s license? I mean any kind of pilot license, from airline pilot to powered parachute pilot? Out of the 327,200,000 people in the United States, only 465,513 people are certificated pilots. That is only 1 person out of 700 people! And the United States has more pilots than any other country on Earth. Let’s put this another way. In 2018, 1,783 students graduated from Harvard with an undergraduate degree. If averages hold true, not even three of those Harvard grads will ever become faa certificated pilots! No wonder being a pilot is looked at as some kind of exotic skill by movie-makers and the general public. Because it turns out that being a pilot really is pretty special! There are a couple of important things to take away from all of this specialness. First, another way of saying you are special is to say that you are part of a minority. Special sounds a lot better, right? But politically, pilots are a true minority. And like some other minorities, we get some privileges that the general public doesn’t get. I mean, flying is the obvious one, of course. But we also have access to runways and facilities that are provided by the government. Each year the federal government spends over $4B in runway construction. Yes, that is four billion with a B. Of course most of that money is spent on large airports that serve the airline industry, which in turn serves the general public. But still, a lot of that money trickles down to our local general aviation airports. We also have land set aside for aviation use, hangars built to store our aircraft, and even our very own federal agency to monitor our activities. (OK. Sometimes being special isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.) The point is, that as pilots, we should make the effort to stay involved politically to make sure that we can continue flying. Because face it, there aren’t that many of us here to do the job. Getting involved with organizations such as the usua, usppa, pra, eaa, lama, and the aopa helps amplify our voices and promote the cause of aviation. If everyone would depend on the ‘next guy’ to get the job done, then ultimately nothing would get done. You don’t have to do a lot, but realize in this case that being special comes with a certain amount of responsibility. And by the way, to those of you who aren’t yet special in a pilot sort of way, let’s make 2020 the year you get yourself special! And a Word About the E6B… As I expected, I heard back from some of you who are fans of the E6B. And honestly, I don’t have any arguments with any of the good points brought up by Mike Arman and Ken Kranik in their letters printed at the front of this issue. Similarly, I don’t have any arguments with most of the specific rules or regulations that the faa writes for our protection, but which taken together make flying more expensive and often less user-friendly. I am just offering the idea that the cumulative effect of insisting that student pilots do things the hard way contributes to discouraging people from learning to fly. I picked on the E6B because it is an unnecessary to learn (in my opinion) antique and compares directly to my long-retired slide rule, which also doesn’t need batteries. Long live the E6B!
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