A quick and easy request: Please do me a favor and subscribe to the Larry the Flying Guy channel. YouTube has changed their policies in a way that makes it harder for smaller channels to be found and grow, so your subscription would help a lot! All you have to do is click the button below and you're done!
This month, Southwest's application window was open for new pilots. I'm over half way to my 1000 hours of jet PIC, so I'm getting close enough to their requirements that I wouldn't be totally wasting their time. So, for the first time, I applied.
I remember feeling a mixture of nervousness and excitement when I applied at my current airline. It was mixed with a "What am I doing applying at an airline? Can I really do this?"
When I got hired and went through training, I was sure I shouldn't be there. I was positive I wasn't doing it right and any day they were going to send me home. If you read my series "Becoming an Airline Pilot" back in 2014, you might remember that it wasn't until over halfway through I dared open my training folder and look at the grades in it.
I was sure I was one step from failing, and yet when I finally did get the courage to peek, I was doing just fine!
I have over twice as many hours in the logbook as I did then. I've added an EMB-145 type rating on top of the Dash-8. I passed upgrade with flying colors and I've spent a year in the Captain's seat now. After four years on the job, I'm reaching the point in my career where people start to move on to major carriers. It should be a piece of cake to apply by this point, right?
Nope. Despite having spent the last several years zooming around the sky at hundreds of MPH in 50,000-pound airplanes and having carried 59,897 passengers 522,369 miles, I felt the same thing this time around as I did when the largest thing I'd ever flown was a 6-seat Beech Baron: "What am I doing applying at a place like Southwest? Who do I think I am?"
This must mean I'm insecure and lack confidence, right? Well, actually, that rhetorical question was thrown in there to make my wife roll on the floor with laughter. That's probably the absolute last way she'd describe me.
It's actually a very common phenomenon called the "Impostor Syndrome". It's rarely talked about in aviation because pilots would never admit to something like that. Nonetheless, Wikipedia's article includes a small example of some people who actually have admitted to having felt like an impostor, and it includes a Supreme Court justice, several super-successful actors (like Tom Hanks, for instance), multiple best-selling authors, and some billionaires.
It's also addressed in Barbara Oakley's book A Mind for Numbers, which I raved about two years ago and highly recommend. Although its subtitle is "How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)", I wrote about it several times because it's really a book that is more about learning how to learn than it is learning math and science, which makes it extremely valuable to people who are learning how to fly. The material applies to all subjects and tasks you'll need to learn throughout your lifetime, and is really a book for everyone in that respect.
In my case, I certainly don't suffer from a lack of confidence. I simply have extremely high standards; sometimes to the point of them being unrealistically high standards. I tend to expect more out of myself than is humanly possible, and despite asking for more from myself than what is reasonable, I still am unhappy when I fail to jump over the bar I've set too high. If that's a real flaw, it's one I'm happy to live with, and my next post will go into why that is.
I don't expect to get a call from Southwest this time around. Not because I don't think I don't deserve one, but simply because I haven't yet checked off all the boxes they like to see. Their total time requirement is only 2500 hours, and I'm almost twice that now, but they do prefer 1000 hours of jet PIC time and I'm not quite 2/3rds of the way there at the moment.
So even though I don't expect a call, it's not because of the impostor syndrome per se, but because there are still a lot of people out there that have checked all the boxes. Nonetheless, I will still keep applying, because they like to see you applying over and over. To them, it means you have the persistence and real desire to work for them.
I will keep applying until one day you get to read a series on becoming a 737 pilot! See you next Wednesday!
A quick and easy request: Please do me a favor and subscribe to the Larry the Flying Guy channel. YouTube has changed their policies in a way that makes it harder for smaller channels to be found and grow, so your subscription would help a lot! All you have to do is click the button below and you're done!
Please like Larry the Flying Guy on Facebook to help it grow too! Just click the "Like" button below:
Follow @Lairspeed
The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.
It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.
No comments:
Post a Comment