Young And Dumb - On Surviving Inexperience While Gaining Experience

I grew up and learned to fl y on the snow-swept plains of Minnesota, but I really grew up in the crowded, smoggy skies over Southern California. It’s where I spent a couple of lean years fl ight instructing and freight dogging, making lifelong friends while scrambling to make ends meet on some vanishingly small paychecks.

- Sam Weigel

I left SoCal when I started working for the airlines 14 years ago, but flying back here still feels like a homecoming. The descent into LAX takes me right over all the airports and landmarks I knew then, and a flood of memories accompanies each one. Back then, flying a Boeing 767 from New York to Los Angeles seemed like a pleasant but impossibly distant dream; now it’s a perfectly routine workday, and I don’t feel too many years removed from that young flight instructor dreaming of flying the big jets.

Ah, but a look in the mirror tells the truth. I’m not truly young anymore; I am in fact rapidly sliding into the dreaded “middle age.” I have aches and scars and a waistline that lately refuses to keep the secret of my fondness for craft beer and lack of enthusiasm for gyms. With approaching decrepitude comes the temptation to cast a retrospectively rosy hue upon the misadventures of my youth, remembering the “good old days” to the exclusion of the not so good. Gazing over the vast expanse of Southern California, it is all too easy to declare my years here some of the best of my life. But then I look at specific places, and recall certain events, and I remember things that weren’t at all pleasant. I remember being tired and frustrated and scared in airplanes. I remember doing boneheaded, unprofessional things. I remember being ashamed of the inexperience and stupidity that led me to make those choices.