Flygirl

Ok…so here’s my two cents on he matter…for whatever it’s worth.  As a flight attendant-turned-student-pilot, I feel it might be relevant. :)

One or two of the pilots from my airline…well I always marvel at the fact that they find their way from the hotel to the crew van each morning if you know what I mean…Thick as a plank (and one of them is off to fly for Cathay! Wonderful…)  Honestly, when I’m having a rough time with a course or something, I just think “Hey, if HE can do it, so can I!”  But then these dumb guys who get the jobs often turn out to be the ones have parents who know people or something like that.

From my own experience, it’s not easy  It’s not ridiculously hard…I would classify it as a challenge.  The basics of learning to fly isn’t ridiculously difficult, but perfecting things well enough to do a flight test was tricky.  And for me it was an emotional roller-coaster.  I’d do something well and be on top of the world, or I’d have trouble with something and get flustered and frustrated.  For me the hardest thing is learning to control my emotions and not let them get the better of me.  I may want to scream at myself when I bollocks something up, but I just have to get the f*** over it and do it again and again until I nail the damned thing.  Perseverance and my own damned stubbornness have been my biggest assets so far.

And then the technical things you need to learn, as well as all the aerodynamics and stuff like that are a definite challenge to me, because I’ve never been someone with a technical/scientific mind.  But I just work hard at it, and I’m doing very well.

You sound like a smart young woman, and you’re a college grad, so you’ve got a brain.  I’m sure you could handle it no problem.  Plus you have a definite advantage.  You have no idea how much you will have picked up just from flight attending.  In some things I’m miles ahead of my class just because of my jobs.  I know some things my INSTRUCTORS have no clue about, just because I hang out in the flight deck and ask questions, and lots of them.  

The only thing is if you plan to try and make a career out of it, prepare for some intense schooling, and being broke for a while.  And flight attending doesn’t work so well with flight training, I’ve discovered, because I can’t be province-hopping all the time when I’m trying to build skill for a flight test or something.  It just doesn’t work, so that’s why I don’t work for The Airline as much any more.

Also, it’s a man’s man’s man’s world…I know everyone is all “gender equality, yay, let’s go” but you are still going to come across a fair few prats who think that flying airplanes is a man’s business and that us with the boobs have no place even trying.  It’s annoying, but the only way I see to deal with it is to kick ass and be better than them!  That way they can’t say shit…well they can, but they’ll be so obviously wrong they’ll make themselves look dumb.  :) Hope that helps.

<3