I flew with a new hire today and remembered how interesting my job is

I’ve been at my job for just over a year now. Sure, a year isn’t THAT long, but you know how little time it takes for a job to get repetitive.

From the outside, it sounds unreal. Flying a small, bright orange Cessna 172 at 400 feet off the ground. Dodging towers, birds, and other airplanes. Regularly making turns that make you experience 2 G’s.

But then the actual work sets in. Flying an airplane can be an effort on its own. Flying pipeline patrols adds another level of difficulty. Whether we’re following a line on a GPS or reading a paper map, we have to always be 2 steps ahead of the airplane. Knowing where to go next, knowing who to talk to next, watching for hazards to the pipeline… Setting the airplane up so that we can take photos outside is another treat. It has to be trimmed out and leveled properly so that we don’t crash while I’m looking through the lens of the camera. Landing and doing hours of paperwork. Reports, Photoshopping photos, updating logbooks…

But today, I took a new employee on his first commercial flight. And all of the normally mundane and annoying parts of the flight became cool again. When we need to take a photo of something outside, we open the window. Opening a window of an airplane? I had never done that before this job. I was complaining about the cold outside with the window open while the new hire seemed pretty amazed at it.

A 45 degree bank in a turn is considered a “steep turn.” And it is steep. But they are so regular now for me that they just feel normal. Maybe a 60 degree turn is steep. But this guy was coming right out of flight training where all turns are done at around 15–20 degrees. Boring. All these 45 degree turns became fun again.

After we landed, we shut down the airplane, took off our headsets, and his words were, “That was fuckin’ awesome!”

It’s hard to call flying work. It’s even better when you finally start getting paid for it.

Makes me appreciate what I do a bit more.