By Michael Gilmour 

Aviation is an expensive business and for private pilots like myself the cost of flying is in the vicinity of $200 per hour. In the vast majority of cases, this is $200 post tax which means that flying a couple hours per month equates to a lot of dresses in my wife’s wardrobe.

It’s such an expensive hobby that in the midst of the global financial crisis many private pilots have even been struggling to maintain their currency let alone fly to an exciting destination. The dream of being able to flit around Australia and drop into whatever township strikes your fancy remains as elusive as ever. So what do you do?

My first option was to continue the dream by getting to know as many pilots as possible and jumping in the back of anything that flew just so that I could be up in the air. Looking down at the world from 4,500 feet just seemed so much more exciting than the usual bumper-to-bumper traffic of the daily grind. I’ve had a great time doing this and chipping in with the expense of the aircraft is always greatly appreciated.

Let’s face it, most friends that fly would willingly reciprocate jumping into the right hand seat when you next go up. This means that the hours spent in the air are multiplied from your couple per month to how many friends you have.

There are also a number of different groups that have been established that cost split aircraft with aviation enthusiasts that just like flying, even if they aren’t pilots themselves. This is a great idea for all those who enjoy being airborne.

My problem was that work (ie. the place that pays for the flying bills) became busier, interest rates have continued to rise and just getting the time to fly has become a major effort. So naturally, I took up the next best aviation pastime. I found myself armed with my camera sitting at the end of the runway while listening to the circuits on my trusty handheld.

From my perspective, if you can’t be up in the air you may as while take photos of aircraft that are in the air. It’s the closest thing to flying without the expense. The initial motivation for doing this was to grab a few snap shots for an aviation screen saver that I make freely available on Downwind but I found that I received a couple of unexpected side benefits.

The first was that by carefully observing aircraft on finals and then as they did a ‘touch-n-go’ I noticed a lot of the problems that I wrestled with in my training being replayed out before me. From overshooting the threshold, to undershooting, being too high or not correctly lined up. All of these were in evidence as trainee after trainee honed their skills towards becoming a better pilot.

For example, I saw one aircraft come in on a glide approach that was way too high and I could mentally picture the instructor pitching the nose down as I watched the Cessna plummet earthwards.  Sure enough, it levelled out and made a perfect landing. It was only a few years ago that my instructor did exactly the same manoeuvre for me as I tried to keep the plane in the air rather than land it.

As I peered through the fence I found myself ‘riding’ in the cockpit of each and every aircraft as they made their final approaches. In the hour that I was taking photos, I relived much of my training and I would highly recommend that all private pilots sit at the end of the runway and enjoy the experience. The experience will highlight just how far you’ve come in your own aviation journey.

A second benefit that I received was that in about an hour I took about 150 photos but, more interestingly, spoke with about 10 different people as they were also inexorably drawn to the mystique of flying. There was an amazingly wide cross section from the community from a plumber to a sales person and even a mother with her children. None of these people flew but all of them loved seeing planes in the sky.

When I told them that I was a pilot I couldn’t stop the questions about what it was like, how much did it cost, what they had to do to start and did I think they could do it. For many people there is a secret desire to fly combined with a secret fear that they wouldn’t ‘make the cut’.

I’m amazed that a flying school hasn’t permanently posted a sales person down at the favourite viewing point to encourage people to spend their hard earned dollars on learning to fly. In the space of about one hour I’m confident that at least one of them would have begun the journey to becoming a pilot. It would have to be the cheapest promotional activity that’s possible. These are people who would love to learn to fly and just need to be shown how they can achieve their dream.

The challenge for the general aviation industry is that it has inadvertently created barriers that where the general public believe that learning to fly requires a degree in ‘neuro-science’ or, at the very least, more funds than they could ever get together. As pilots can testify, learning to fly isn’t that hard, it just takes a bit of work. Strangely, the cash problem normally hits after you have your license not while you’re getting it.

Let’s imagine a world where the general public listens fondly to the buzz of a Piper Warrior overhead (I know that I do) and the price of land around airports skyrockets as people want their house right under the flight path of a major training airport. My house sits right under the downwind leg for runway 17L/35R at Moorabbin and I couldn’t be happier.

This is in sharp contrast to the current antagonistic view that many residents feel towards airports. At the moment airports are viewed in a similar manner to electric power plants: everyone wants to turn on the light switch (i.e. fly on holidays) as long as the pollution or noise doesn’t impact them. This is the convenience but not, in my backyard, the mentality.

 The result is that many airports are being sold off by governments eager to please voting constituents, developers and their accountants. There’s nothing like a quick few million in cash added to the bank account combined with getting voted into power at the next election to get a politician’s blood going. I sometimes wonder if politicians believe that the best photo opportunity possible is kissing a baby in front of an ‘airport closed’ sign. I think that they take the view that some other council can spend the political capital and millions of dollars to establish a new airfield further out from all of the residents.

Hang on a second, isn’t this how the many GAAP (soon to be class D) training airfields were created? They were initially a long way out from the urban sprawl but the low cost of land around the airports attracted residential development and these same residents are now using their political muscle to try and close the airports that made their houses inexpensive in the first place. It’s just so unfair! Or is it?

Light aircraft aviation has been experiencing the brunt of the airport closures and the reality of it all is that it makes perfect sense. The perception is that Joe Citizen believes that airports are used by only a handful of elitist, filthy rich, self indulgent pilots that fly around the sky in noisy machines that I’m not able to fly because I’m either too poor, too stupid or both. The challenge for the aviation industry is to turn this attitude around so that aviation is seen as being within the reach of everyone.

In terms of numbers, general aviation doesn’t have them to get a politician interested in our cause at all. We can jump up and down all we like about the impact that airport closures and the decline of general aviation will have on the wider aviation industry and nothing will happen. Politicians understand one thing and that’s the number of voters and we just don’t have them....yet.

Whenever the industry talks about numbers we think in terms of commercial, private or recreational pilots. What we need to do is broaden our scope to all those people that have the dream of flying.

So I’m their sitting with my camera taking photographs of planes landing on 17R chatting with person after person as they join me goggling at planes landing a few hundred metres away. These people are the dreamers and many of them could one day become pilots.

Let’s imagine that I said to them, “It’s a shame isn’t it?”

“What’s a shame?”

 “Your airport’s going to be closed so you won’t be able to learn to fly here.”

“What do you mean?”

“The government has decided that learning to fly isn’t really important so they’re moving all training to out in the sticks. By the way, this means it will cost a load to learn to fly.”

Watch the reaction. It’s likely to be shock, followed by disappointment and then anger. The Jetsons’ dream of everyone being able to fly is still strong in the community they just need to have the reality spelt out for them.

I believe that Joe Citizen has been completely misrepresented. My experience has proved to me that the love of flying in the community is alive and well and that people actually love their airports and planes buzzing overhead. It gives them a ‘warm feeling’ all over that someone out there is living the dream that they have. I wouldn’t be surprised if a survey was taken which had the question, “Would you like to learn to fly?” then the majority of the respondents would tick “yes”.

It’s the hundreds of thousands of Australians that love flying to a destination on their holidays and fight for a window seat so that they can see the world far below that are the aviation industry’s secret political weapon. It’s the dreamers that in many cases need only a nudge to get them on the path of aviation enlightenment that will ultimately save our airports and the general aviation industry as a whole.

The challenge for the aviation industry is that it’s walled the community out by making flying as mysterious possible. For example, when I first learnt to fly I searched on Google for a Moorabbin flying school that said, ‘learn to fly’. I called them up, booked in and away I went. I thought that after a few lessons that would be it – isn’t it like driving a car? It was only then that I discovered that it was almost impossible to understand what the various steps in the educational progress were and the jargon was unbelievable.

If people had to learn to drive cars with the jargon of the aviation industry then we would all be stopping at ILFROGS where ILFROGS would stand for Indicating Lights For Retarding or Go Signalisation.  The general public would prefer to call them traffic lights.

Joe Citizen has a desire to fly but for them you may as well go to the moon as try and get a pilot’s license. Over the past decade this has been reflected in the decline in general aviation and if it wasn’t for the international student market then most of the flying schools would be well and truly out of business.

So I’m sitting there chatting with a mother with three kids at the end of runway 17R and talking about the joys of flying. “So how do you become a pilot?”, she asks.