First published in Swashplate Magazine August 2012.

I was on top of the commercial helicopter
world: best equipment, best company, best
maintenance, ideal schedule, healthiest paycheck,
lots of prestige, flying over the most beautiful
terrain on earth, the island of Kauai in Hawaii; A
pilot’s version of Hog Heaven. Then the near
syncope, the dizzy spell, and inside of thirty
seconds thirty years of flying flew out the cockpit
window. Grounded, busted, Class 2 medical byebye.
I was done.
Did I crash? Oh, buddy. One day I took off
with a bunch of happy, camera snappy tourists,
zipped around the exotic terrain of Kauai, hovered
over waterfalls, careened around rainbows while
earning the fattest paycheck I ever got ‐ plus big
tips on top of it. The next day, grounded, I slept
late, shuffled around in my bathrobe at noon,
income zero, fondling the remote, future bleak. I
was fifty‐five. Moving the sticks around in a
cockpit was all I knew how to do, all I wanted to do.
The worst part wasn’t the loss of money; it
was the loss of identity. Something my flight
school instructor once said came back to me:
“Decide if you’re a pilot or a passenger, because
you can’t be both.” Watching helicopters cruise
over the house all day, tears pooling in my eyes, I
rebelled at the thought that I was now a passenger.
“I’m a pilot, dammit!” I said, as those guys
overhead, former colleagues, clattered into the
distance leaving me behind.
Funny how the universe seems to provide
whatever it is we ask for. Floundering around,
looking for something I could do to be successful
once again, I started getting direct mail offers.
New ones every damn day. I thought I’d
need a bigger mailbox. “Hurry, offer expires at
midnight!” Only a privileged few get this
opportunity!” “Act now, won’t last long!” “The
secret wealth button only you know about.” Those
copywriters knew exactly what my soft spot was. It
was centered not so much around my cash hole as
next to my ego bone. I needed success. I was
desperate for it, craven and anxious, grasping for
anything I could find that I might be good at again,
or at least competent. Those direct mail buzzards
circled overhead grinning, as I grabbed my
hemorrhaging checkbook and sent money to Bob’s
Pretty Good Ad Copy School, and The Lottery
Insider’s Newsletter, and How To Make $$$ With
On‐Line Pet Supplies. I was pathetic.
It was so bad that, in late 2006, I wrote
another check to a community college to get my
Real Estate license when half the agents in town
were getting out of the business. I figured I’d flown
over enough real estate, I could surely sell some of
it, right? Now I can report that there is indeed a lot
of money in Real Estate. There’s several thousand
dollars of my money in it somewhere.
My poor, eminently patient wife. Holy
Mackerel, did she put up with a line of
thunderstorms. Moody, irritable, touchy as hell, I
was unlivable. The definition of self‐absorption.
Why she stuck around is a mystery, but she
did, God love her. I didn’t shave, ate crap and
gained twenty pounds, never listened, showed no
interest in her ups and downs. I was like a rabid
porcupine with heartburn and shingles. It was all
about me. Food was rotten. Neighbors were loud.
Taxes too high, amount of sex too low. I should say
sex was nonexistent. Comparisons between one
stick and another notwithstanding, the one was too
soft for use, so there was yet another cockpit I was
unable to enter. It was awful, even if she swore
she didn’t mind. “No really, it’s okay! Don’t worry
about it.” Yeah, right.
So what did I do? How did I close my flight
plan with a bit of grace, finally, after a few years of
wrenching headwinds and denial, and a quixotic
quest to get my medical back? If you find yourself
in a similar spot, maybe this procedure will help.
Lesson number one is wait. Settle in.
There’s a reason for the cool down time for your
Lycoming, or Turbomeca, or Pratt & Whitney. It
allows temperatures to stabilize. Bad metaphor
maybe, but it’s the same idea. The old principle
applies: Emotion high; intelligence low. Relax, if
possible, and just acknowledge that you’ve been
handed a pretty unstable load. Give your CG time
to settle down. I never met a pilot who flew for a
living because nothing else came along. Pilots fly
because we love it. I couldn’t believe they paid me
to fly. Sometimes I couldn’t believe how little they
paid me to fly, but those times were pretty rare. If
you lose your medical, or for some reason can’t fly
again, try to let it go, wait, give the idea time to
sink in. It’s no time to make durable decisions,
because they’re likely to be lousy.
But getting grounded really is like a death.
Treat it that way, don’t ignore the pain of it. The
cringe in your gut when an aircraft flies overhead
and you’re not in it is real. It hurts. A lot. Let it,
because you have a lot invested in the competence
you displayed up in the pointy end all those years,
and that pain needs to come out. Despite our
working lives in the ethereal elements of sky and
cloud and wind and weather, pilots tend not to be
of the airey‐fairey ilk. We tend instead to be hardnosed,
realistic, cynical at times. But losing an
aviation career may even require a visit to a
psychologist, a professional in the airey‐fairey art
of navigating around inside the human head and
heart. Nothing wrong with it. Squeeze the mike
and talk it out. Can’t hurt.
As for the noble quest to get your up slip
safely back in your wallet, and get back in the air,
go for it, but only if you can answer a couple of
questions with brutal honesty. Number one, do
you really want to fly again? Number two, is it a
good idea? Absurd questions? Maybe not. In my
case the decision was made for me. After the near
syncope grounded me, and no amount of poking or
probing or prodding could figure out why it
happened, the FAA demanded a minimum of two
years before I could reapply for a class 2 medical.
In that time I reconciled myself to not flying again,
went back to college, and finished a degree
program that was interrupted way back in the
twentieth century. Number two, is it possible
you’ve done all the whifferdills you need for a
lifetime, flown over enough real estate, had an
equal number of takeoffs and landings (a very good
thing) and it really is your time to hang up the
headset? Could be. I could have ignored my dizzy
spell, climbed back into the cockpit and took off
again. But I couldn’t bring myself to jeopardize
thirty years of safe, incident free flying. I’m proud
to say that after 12,500 hours my record is
spotless.
As for cash and the blandishments of having
it, there’s no shame in working at the hardware
store, or driving a cab, or going retail at Macy’s or
Target, or even Wal‐Mart. Times are tough. But to
capture a commercial license you had to be tough,
and you had to eat a lot of excrement along the
way. If money’s coming in you’ll feel better, trust
me. I drove a courtesy car for a hospital for a
while, and I actually enjoyed it. It was just above
minimum wage but the people were friendly, the
schedule was good, they appreciated my work and
there was no medical to lose. There are a lot of
jobs out there if you’re willing to swallow the ego
thing and claim one of them. Hell, Starbucks gives
every barista a pound of coffee a week.
Speaking of diet and exercise and all that
health‐related stuff, if grounded you will lose
energy, tend toward depression, lose interest in
almost everything but your own pitiful self.
Consequently you’ll load up on carbs, nature’s
comfort food. You won’t pass a Ho‐Ho or a Twinkie
in the grocery. My guilty pleasure was ice cream.
Man, that salty caramel was, well, almost like
hovering. It wasn’t long before I’d exceeded my
allowable gross weight. Vegetables, fruit, lo‐fat,
unprocessed foods? Forget it. Give us this day our
daily chocolate. Twenty pounds I gained, in a year.
Can you say spare tire?
The looming medical was always a good
thing; pilots, generally, take pretty good care of
their health. Without the threat of losing an FAA
medical there’s no incentive pushing us to healthy
diets, positive attitudes, or self‐restraint. The
obvious advice here is to join a gym, establish a
routine, maybe with your spouse so you can keep
at it.
Speaking of routines, create one right away.
Even if it means hauling your ass out of bed at the
same time every day, walking a couple miles, doing
the routine things you always did. Pilots thrive on a
routine. Call it your checklist; do it every day, and
you’ll minimize the potential for a crash.
Pay attention to the people around you,
especially the ones on your side. Your spouse is
not your enemy. He/She is your friend, and helper,
and listener and hug buddy, even if they’re still
gainfully employed, with benefits. Especially then!
The short version is this: it may seem to be all
about you; it isn’t; get over yourself. Especially in
aviation it’s likely that a spouse has put their life on
hold so you could pursue your dream seat in the
sky. Maybe it’s time to let them chase their
dream? I know it’s hard, but it may also be
eminently fair.
Some last suggestions. Grooming counts.
Nobody wants a slug around the house, a couch
spud wearing a bathrobe with month‐old coffee
stains on the sleeves that smells like burnt jet fuel.
Shave, shower, get dressed. Take care of yourself
physically, and the emotional part will come along
in time.
Here’s a radical idea: volunteer somewhere.
There are so many options out there it’s silly to
start listing them, and you might find out you, gulp,
like working for nothing else than the satisfaction
of helping others.
Listen. We’re used to doing it on the radio.
With thirty‐eleven call signs bleeping back and
forth, we could always pick out our own when the
controller called. And we always waited to
transmit so we didn’t step on anybody else. Use
that skill with people at home. Your spouse and
kids will be amazed that your hearing isn’t selective
after all, and you actually want to hear what they
have to say.
The hardest part of losing my flying career
wasn’t the money. It was the loss of identity, the
sense of personal worth, and the feeling of failure.
For forty years I told people I was a pilot. It wasn’t
a job, or how I paid the bills. It wasn’t what I was,
it was who I was. Perhaps the consolation of losing
such a career begins long before it’s gone. Maybe
it’s better to tell people we’re parents of three
great kids, or an excellent husband/wife. Maybe
we get used to the idea that flying is just a job.
Heretical as it sounds, perhaps it’s better to
acknowledge that, as privileged as we are/were to
fly for a living, it’s that word, privilege, that’s the
key. Almost by definition a privilege is temporary.
The way to close your flight plan with ease and
grace may be to figure out who you really are, and
take pride in that