Piloting??

Question

if a 15 year old dude wanting to be a pilot...

what do i need to do now to achive my goal im in the 10th grade!

and can i major in piloting in some colleges?

Answer 1

What you need to do now is save up enough money for your lessons. I began my flight training the summer after sophmore year of highschool, with a few thousand in the bank, expecting to pay any excess costs as I went by working an after-school job. Biiiiig mistake, the whole process turned out to be a nightmare.

I started out in a Diamond for a couple lessons, and then foolishly decided to move to the much more expensive Piper-Archer III due to the insane cockpit heat inside the diamond. Plane rentals cost around the 100$/hr range...plus fuel surcharge which is going up steadily. Instructors are from 35-50$ per hr. The first several lessons are usually about an hour long, however once you start getting into two hour lessons or more, each one costs upwards of 300$

To complete your lessons in a timely manner you need to be flying at least twice a week. However, once my savings ran out, I began dumping pretty much my whole paycheck into each lesson. Getting paid bi-weekly, I had to wait two weeks in between lessons.

The problem with this is, a lot of information from previous lessons is lost in this time, and I spent many hours in the air simply reviewing forgotten material.

Not only that, when you stretch out the time it takes for your lisence, you will most likely find yourself going through multiple instructors as most of them are just trying to get hours in for airline jobs. Each time you get a new instructor, they will probably want to take a few lessons just to figure out what you know...which is fine except a few lessons can cost you over $1,000. They pretty much also like to start you off from scratch to imbed their methodologies in your head. It all started going downhill after my first instructor left.

After everything was said and done, My flight instruction cost me over 3 years, 5 instructors, and over $15,000. Throughout that time, I saw airplane and fuel costs rise significantly.

So before you start here are some tips.

.Don't get tricked into using a more expensive aircraft than you need. a cesna 152/172 will work fine for training. Its easy to get checked out for new aircraft once you get your license.

.Research prices of more than one local flight schools. I could have saved probably 50-100$ a lesson going to a different school.

.Ask your instructor questions such as how long he/she intends on sticking around. Also, ask around the field about who they think is the best teacher. I went through more than one completely incompetent flight instructor in my experience. Many of them are good pilots but awful teachers.

.STUDY! I'd reccomend buying the private pilot books, some maps, and a FAR/AIM. You can save a TON of money if you can basically skirt the ground lessons by already knowing the material and youll be better prepared for your airtime.

Make sure you have at the minimum, 6000$ on hand to spend...and be prepared to spend 10,000$+. You absolutely want to get your lessons complete as quickly as possible to save money.

There are some colleges which are aviation oriented scattered throughout the country. Embry-Riddle in Florida is one of the most well known. If you don't want to take that route then you can join AFROTC at many universities and get your lisence practically for free.