AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019 - 34

PILOT BRIEFING
YOU CAN FLY |

Can I still land an airplane?
A rusty pilot shares his comeback story
BY DAN NAMOWITZ

IT WAS AUGUST 1989 when private pilot George Gillett took time
out from his flying while he concentrated on graduating from college. The flying was going well. He was working on his instrument
rating, and was only five hours short of eligibility to take the practical test. But there wasn't enough time or money for academia plus
aviation. Graduation day came in May 1990. A new job, relocation,
and family responsibilities came along, as did "life in general that
got in the way of returning to the cockpit."
Fortunately, Gillett's aviation story-which had begun in
December 1979 at North Carolina's Sky Manor Airport while
he was in the military based at Camp Lejeune-didn't end at the

college commencement ceremony. He still had his flight case,
plotter, flight computer, and old charts, and he would break them
out for a look now and then. But it wasn't until September 2018,
after retirement from a law-enforcement career marked by eight
relocations in five states that Gillett, now a Knoxville, Tennessee,
resident, hit the internet to see what was going on in aviation.
The information he found online got the juices flowing. He
learned the FAA would mail him an updated pilot certificate and
he discovered AOPA offers a Rusty Pilots Online course, the webbased version of the popular AOPA Rusty Pilots seminars that have
helped thousands of lapsed pilots get back to flying.

How he did it

Tips for rusty pilots from George Gillett

Find a good teacher: "If I was going to
make any attempt at flying again, finding the right CFI was important to me.
After searching around a bit, I found Matt
Prince, CFII at AvZ Aviation in Knoxville.
Matt was the calmest CFI that I had ever
interacted with and seemed to have endless
patience answering my questions, reassuring me that I wouldn't have any problems,
and investing his time with me before we
ever got into an airplane."
Go back for more: "After a full week of
thinking about whether or not to return,

34 | AOPA PILOT April 2019

on October 25, 2018, I returned for another
flight. This time, I wasn't quite as nervous as the first time and one of the three
landings that day was acceptable by my
standards."
Have a plan: "I thought long and hard
about my path forward as a pilot after the
October 25, 2018, lesson and decided that I
wanted to finish training for my instrument
rating, try to pass the written test, and then
a checkride. So, I committed myself to my
new goal, even though it was like I had
stepped through an aviation time warp.

"There was much to learn, but I discovered that aviation had changed for the
better. GPS RNAV approaches were more
straightforward than the old nonprecision NDB approaches that I had trained
on. Electronic flight bags and iPads as knee
boards had made navigation so much easier
and safer. Cellphones allowed easy flight
plan filing and cancelling. There were no
more paper charts and plates to keep track
of in the cockpit, fewer holds and position
reports, so the pilot workload during flight
was eased."
Good advice: "Absolutely do it. You won't
regret it. Take it one maneuver, one flight,

AOPA Pilot Magazine - April 2019

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