Aviation
Learning to fly is a sublime challenge that requires keeping track of trigonometry, physics, meteorology, and law while maneuvering a vehicle in three dimensions at 100 mph.
The virtues of aviation are those positive character traits that are implicitly demanded and specifically rewarded by the nature of aviation. They are: Intelligence, Self-Control, Independent Judgment, and Honor. Generally speaking, the unequivocal nature of aviation -- the fact that you can get killed -- is the source of these virtues. As an attribute of intelligence, honesty means more than not lying to other people. It means recognizing the "primacy of existence" -- in other words admitting what you know to be true (about the plane, about the weather, about yourself) no matter how much you wish it were not. Integrity makes independent judgment possible. Not all pilots practice it, but aviation rewards it, nonetheless. Integrity is being who and what you are. Independent judgment requires the objectivity (honesty) of recognizing the facts. Conjectivity is the virtue of being willing to try something -- especially when you are in trouble -- to see if the effect is beneficial to you.
The list of social virtues under Honor stems from the fact that no one else's opinion of you is as important as your own opinion of yourself. We tend to gloss over this. We are shy and we do not like to brag. The bottom line is that every flight is a test flight. Flying is unequivocal: you cannot argue the facts away. We are reality-based and this colors all of our relationships. To act dishonorably, or irresponsibly, or disrespectfully is to fall from grace. Pilots act like angels because we live in the sky.
Buffalo. July 1998. Niagara Falls International Airport is sparse, empty, and vacuous. The unbroken horizon feels more like west Texas than it does the industrial Northeast. The air national guard has a corner of NFIA. You can see their huge jet, probably a B-52 or a C-47; it is hard to tell from so far away. In another corner, you can find an FBO and a dozen private planes.
Oddly enough, NFIA has a controller in the tower during daylight hours. A facilities manager from the county said that the terminal recently had passenger service and might again soon but basically, time had passed the airport by. Superhighways and legal gambling in Canada combined to remove the need for anyone to land there.
The sleek art deco building that was Bell Aerospace is on the east side of the airport. Niagara Falls Boulevard runs along it. You do not measure the Bell Aerospace building in feet but in fractions of a mile. From the airport you see that it is about as wide as it is long. It is only two stories tall. The executive offices were in the curving southwest corner with its enclosed balcony. The factory entrance was available. It said "Niagara Air Service." I walked in.
Air travel posters were the only evidence of Niagara Air Service. Inside, the building was dimly lit through the glass in the ceiling. Floodlights were a thin constellation in the vast space. Off in a distant corner, on the far side of a US Customs holding pen, some men were talking, their voices garbled into echoes. A towmotor or forklift worked unseen in the dim distance.
Open racks and cabinets held parts and tools. New drums sat on skids. The place was being used, but it was obviously underemployed. Closest to the hangar doors, sat two sheriff's helicopters.
Some of the manufacturing offices gave evidence of present occupation: an old khaki bookshelf with new industrial sales catalogs; a short, fat standard handbook, maybe a Machinery Manual or a CRC Chemistry and Physics; a 1998 calendar with a girl on it. Most of the offices were partly furnished and unused or else empty and unused.
Col. Frank Everest was the "fastest man alive." Everest jockeyed for that title with Chuck Yeager, Joe Walker, Slick Goodlin and Skip Ziegler. They flew the Bell X-1, X-1A and X-2. Goodlin and Ziegler were civilian test pilots employed by Bell.
Everest and the other military pilots came to Buffalo to work on the rocket planes. They walked and talked in that building. They worried the designs and sweated the tests and swapped stories in those offices. They grinned and grimaced and frowned and stood with their arms akimbo, jaws tight, while rockets on test beds howled, guzzling liquid oxygen and water alcohol.
Ziegler and Goodlin lived in that building with hundreds of other people. "And no one knew their names," said the actor's voice of Jack Ridley in the movie version of The Right Stuff.
Chuck Yeager's autobiography mentions Larry Bell a couple of times. Larry Bell loved aviation, that much is clear. But look in any coffeetable book of aviation and Larry Bell is conspicuous in his absence. Look in the Encyclopedia Americana and you will find Bert Bell the football coach and John Bell the Whig congressman, but no Larry Bell. In the World Book, under Bell X-1 is only a cross-reference: "See Yeager, Charles E." The International Encyclopedia of Aviation has entries for the famous Bell ships, the Huey Cobra, the Airacobra and Airacomet, but the only person named Bell in that book is Alexander Graham Bell.
However, Lawrence Dale Bell is remembered in his home town, Mentone, Indiana. They have a museum there. The museum has a website, www.livingweb.com/bell that tells about the man who built the company, and about the company he built.
Larry Bell was a contemporary of William Boeing, Igor Sikorsky, Claude Ryan, and Eddie Stinson. Bell worked for Glenn L. Martin and then joined Consolidated in Buffalo. When Consolidated relocated to California, Bell stayed behind and started his own company in 1935.
Today, the Bell Helicopter product line is part of the Textron company. Engineering students at the University at Buffalo enjoy the high tech distance learning labs at Bell Hall.
Larry Bell started out as an aircraft mechanic before World War I. His company built piston-powered fighter planes for World War II. Bell Aircraft built the rocketplanes that broke the sound barrier and sounded the limits of the upper atmosphere where the sky turns purple. They built the helicopter gunships of the 1960s. They also built the Agena rocket engine. Larry Bell passed away in 1956, a year before production on the Agena started.
He was only 60 years of age when he joined Ziegler and Walker in the footless halls. His drive and vision lifted three generations of pilots and their craft from the runways and drylakes into elliptical orbits. He was thanked with honorary degrees from universities and honorary medals from nations. Long before that he had already enjoyed what no man can give another, the feeling of standing on the concrete in front of a building that bears his name, knowing that inside, the future is being made.
"This is Eric, my flight instructor," I said to my wife. They exchanged greetings and said a few words to each other and then my wife and I walked off to see the rest of the local air show. "He seems so calm," she said. "Yeah," I replied. "But he spends all his time in airplanes with guys like you who do not know how to fly," she said. "Yeah," I replied. "It would make me nervous," she said. "Yeah," I replied.
At that time, I was paying him $27 per hour, or about half what the plane cost. It was his plane -- and his airport. His house was next door. About a year later, I was flying out of a small controlled field with a couple of large FBOs running freight and partial ownerships. The CFIs there got 60% of the $22 per hour charged by the flight school. The guy I flew with was retired from another career, teaching in order to fly and flying to teach. "If I did not have the retirement money, I could not afford this," he said. "What about the other CFIs?" I asked, referring to a bunch of kids I saw hanging out. "Everyone has stars in his eyes," he explained. "They love to fly and are happy to be paid anything to do it, and of course, they are building hours for a better job."
The median individual income in America from 1995 to 2000 ranged near $34,000 per year for a median hourly wage of about $17. A salaried computer programmer with five to ten years of experience makes between $30 and $35 per hour. Unionized industrial workers make $20 to $25 per hour. A production assistant on an automotive assembly line, non-union contract labor, will be paid $10 to $12 per hour. Fast food with a national chain pays $6 to $8 per hour.
Public high school teachers earn $15 to $25 per hour: $30,000 to $50,000 per year -- and not all of them teach well, either. In fact, just what "teaching" is and how we "learn" is not well understood. Problems in epistemology are not well-defined. All we can say is that the flight instructors who are lucky enough to get and keep students who pass their checkrides are thought to know "something" which in 100 years has never been quantified, let alone commoditized. In short, teaching is an art and artists do not make a lot of money.
Supply and demand are cruel. If the general economy is active, aviation does well. Markets are brisk. More freight and more passengers bring more demand for pilots. Prosperity allows more people the opportunity to learn how to fly. These factors add up to mean that more people can (and must) work as CFIs. This keeps the wages of CFIs low. When the economy turns down, the wages of CFIs are also low.(This is the same situation farmers are in. In order for prices to be high, the crops have to fail.) Seen from the supply side, it is a no-win situation.
However, the demand side is the power plant of an economy. CFIs make so little simply because no one is willing to pay more than they "have" to. Why should you? Because it is a question of honor, that's why. No matter who you are or what you do for a living, you should never pay your CFI less than you charge your own clients or employer.
It is possible, perhaps likely, that your CFI will not be "worth" that much. Not all CFIs teach well. Different people learn differently. It makes no sense to pay for instruction you are not getting. However, given that your CFI is doing the job you need to have done, you owe it to them and to yourself to pay what the service is worth to you. It is, after all, your life we are talking about.
Why pay more for a commodity than you need to? You do not look to happily overpay for bread and milk. In the first place labor is NOT a commodity. You are buying human intelligence, the rarest intangible on Earth. In the second place, there is a difference among breads and milks. The Theory of Quality says that whole foods and pure foods are more nutritious and therefore better bargains than cheap foods that are only filling. Similarly, if you stuff your cockpit time with the cheapest instruction you can find, dickered down to the last dime, you may find yourself short on something you really need when your life is on the line.
If you make $100 per hour and you do not feel that your instructor is worth the same amount, then you need a different instructor. Myself, as a technical writer, I earn $35 per hour. I will not pay my CFI less than that.
Michael E. Marotta
