About

Hi, My name is Paul and thanks for dropping by.

I have created this site to chronicle my progression from a trainee to obtaining a Private Pilots Licence (PPL) and beyond. Before you get carried away ladies.. not one of those suit types you see jetting off in the latest hi-tec jumbos and taking you on your holidays, this is strictly light aircraft, grass roots stuff. This blog is going to follow me through the trials and tribulations of my training to eventually gaining my PPL and whatever comes after. I will share with you the highs and the lows, the costs, the equipment and what you may expect to encounter should you decide to venture in to the world of aviators. So follow along and join me on the journey that will take us above the clouds.

For those of you scratching your head and muttering .. why PIC & PUT ?? Well when you fly, you have to log all your time in your own personal pilots flight log book and one of the columns in that log states, ‘Holders Operating Capacity’ or in other words were you the Pilot In Charge or when training, the Pilot Under Tuition.. PIC & PUT.

So how did I get here ???

I started out in life growing up in south Manchester(UK) less than two miles as the crow flies to the East of Manchester Airport, or Ringway as it was often referred to back then, and have great memories of my dad taking me to stand at the end of the runway whilst aircraft passed less than a hundred feet above your head. I dreamt of owning the house that had the landing lights actually in their garden, how cool was that!? The side of the road would always be littered with cars, doors left wide open like a scene from a post apocalyptic film, whilst the owners clung to the chain link fence waiting for the jet wash to hit them from the next aircraft to depart. In hindsight, what they should have been doing is investing in a set of ear mufflers ! These were the days of BAC 1-11’s, Tridents, Boeing 707’s and early 737’s… Your whole body would ripple with the noise, let alone the jet wash, those guys could wake the dead!

On certain weekends, when Dad was flush I guess, we would get to go on the piers. These were the days before terrorism was such a big threat, those sort of things only happened in the middle east didn’t they ? The cost to get on the piers escapes me, but I’m sure the cost of the seasonal ‘timetable’ was about 10 pence! This stapled paper book consisted of all the flights and the times of arrival and departure. you could walk along the top of all three piers at Ringway and take on board some refreshments from the cafe whilst sitting and watching the movements. Sadly that all came to an end in the 80’s. I remember they started to close access to the piers when the EL-AL (Israel’s national airline) jumbo was on the ground and not long after, access to the piers at any time became a thing of the past.

so I did the next worse thing I could possibly do ….I got into computing !

Not just content with watching these magnificent machines, I started down the road of aircraft spotting! This would continue well into my twenties and it took me all over Europe and a two week spotters holiday in the USA. My Uncle (also a spotter) worked at the airport cleaning the aircraft between flights and one of the perks of this job was that the contracted airlines offered tickets to anywhere in the UK for £10, that’s not a typo! Better still, you could fly on any of their European routes for just £25! Obviously these sort of offers were too good to waste and so were duly utilised for spotting weekends in places such as Berlin, Zurich and Athens to name a few. The USA trip I mentioned earlier cost us just £50 return if I remember correctly, yes we were crammed like cattle into a then state of the art Boeing 757, but the journey is made a little better when your uncle knows most of the cabin staff and the perks that come with it.

You would think that I naturally aspired to be a pilot whilst at school, but you would wrong. For one I hated school and the regimentation of it, this did not bode well for the academics required to venture down the path of becoming a pilot. I liked making, taking apart and re/building stuff. Be it electrical or mechanical, I wanted to know how it worked, and if that meant I had to strip it down to find out, so be it and hopefully be able to put it back together again… Sorry Mum & Dad for destroying so many (expensive) gifts ! So it was actually aircraft engineering that interested me. After just about scraping the required grades I was sat down by the careers officer at school and given two options… well Paul you can either join the RAF or there are 2-3 years training options with engineering schools based at Heathrow ! What a disaster, after already mentioning how I hated the regimentation of school, I’m sure you already know the answer to option 1 ! and option 2 to a fresh faced 16 yr old living in Manchester to have to move away was a none starter… so I did the next worse thing I could possibly do ….I got into computing ! At the time I had already gone through a ZX81, onto a ZX Spectrum and then the gud’ole BBC computer and had started to dabble in coding. I Should have gone to Heathrow ! lol

are you mad fella !! if I relax my grip on this thing we are going down I tell ya!

For the next 20 years, thoughts of being a pilot were for the rich and well to do. Then for Christmas 2002 my (soon to be) wife purchased me a flying experience present. She had listened to me over the years mention that it would be good to fly a plane. Later in 2003 I did just that and took a 1 hour intro / flying experience flight in a Cessna 150 out of Headcorn in Kent. I don’t know how to describe the flight really, one part of me loved it, the raw energy of it and looking out at all the fields, the other was absolutely petrified ! the petrified parts were my hands, gripped so tight around the yoke that my knuckles were white! ‘relax Paul’ came the voice from the right hand seat.. ‘just like you drive your car down the motorway, elbow on the window, thumb and finger lightly pinching on the steering wheel’ .. are you mad fella !! if I relax my grip on this thing we are going down I tell ya! At the end of the lesson, be it sales pitch I will never know, but he told me I did well for a first timer and would be a good pilot. Sales pitch or not, I still did not have the finances to pursue the possibility of becoming a pilot.

Strange how loosing your job becomes a good thing…

Since that day, becoming a pilot had once again been nothing more than dreams whilst every now and again coming across the signed ‘certificate’ from the flight experience package whilst routing through draws. Plenty had gone on in my life since then, I got Married, lost my job to India, moved home, started my own computer repair company and I am now an IT contractor for a well known bank. When I was made redundant in 2008, yes right at the start of the big depression, as you would expect, finances were a major worry. I was out of work for nearly 18 months ! and if anything good could come out of being made redundant its how to respect the money you have and not to live on the money you don’t have! Since that time I have been on a self imposed finance plan to rid myself of debt. That’s great Paul, but what’s that got to do with flying?? Well part of that plan was to rid myself of a very old, quite expensive, bank loan of which I had kept re consolidating, and this time I was adamant I would not allow them to talk me into doing it again, it had a final payment due at the end of 2014. Early in 2014 and after another ‘how good it would be to be able to just fly away for the day’ dream it dawned on me that I might just be able to do it… That bank loan ends soon, I will have quite a large chunk of money become available. I had been paying for this loan for well over 10 years, I was well accustomed to having this money deducted from my monthly outgoings, so what’s another couple of years? only this time its paying for something I want.

So I put a plan together to start my training early in 2015, and here we are….