First airline job

... won and lost after just eighteen months in the right-hand seat. Reflections on the rewards of the hardest work in a lifetime

- Lauren Wilson

When I embarked on the long and expensive mission to gain my CPL I had never really wanted to be an airline pilot. The idea of being a ‘button pusher’ filled me with a snobbish dread− after all airliners were just big computers, requiring systems operators and not aviators to move around the skies, weren’t they? You often hear general aviation pilots scoff about airline jockeys with many thousands of hours, pilots they’ve been flying with who ‘can’t land a PA-28 for toffee’, as if somehow this makes the professional less worthy than the amateur. I admit now that I may at times have fallen into the trap of believing that perhaps this could be the case, after all the love of my aviation life is a bullish handful of a little Pitts Special, a machine that bears so little resemblance to your typical airliner it’s hard to believe they both fundamentally share the same blood.

That shared bloodline became rather more obvious to me after I joined the now sadly defunct flybe and learned to fly the Dash 8. This was an aircraft that I can honestly say now holds a chunk of my heart equal in size to that of my little Pitts, for reasons both remarkably similar and wildly different. My feelings aren’t purely about the machine itself; as the truth−as I’m sure every Dash pilot will attest−is that she is a cantankerous handful, requiring a heap of patience and understanding to get the best from−some would say not unlike me, really!