It strikes me that some things in helicopters are opposite from fixed-wings. For example: Some are saying that landing a fixed-wing is the hardest part. In helicopters, taking off is the hardest part. The hardest part of flying helicopters is learning how to hover, and you can’t take off until you learn that.
That fact always reminded me of water skiing. It’s easy to ski. It’s hard to get from a standing start up to speed on top of the water. Learning to get those first few seconds right is a ginormous obstacle.
I know it’s now a little ways upthread, but I read the report on Quantas Flt 32, and just wanted to say what a remarkable piece of detective work that all was. Just amazing that they could work backwards from an exploded engine to find the tiny manufacturing flaw and figure out how it had happened. Well played, that.
As it said, any landing you can walk away from is a good one.
I’ve heard it’s considered a great landing if the plane can be used again. 
As my flight instructor used to say, “What goes up must come down. What comes down had damned well better be able to go up again.”
Article in today’s Washington Post about how pilots have incentives to avoid reporting mental health issues, and the problems they often experience when they do report. We discussed a lot of this a few weeks ago after the incident with the jumpseat pilot:
I haven’t read the article, but ISTM that the FAA only has permanent solutions to temporary problems.
That’s not quite true. The Feds’ attitude to many serious medical things, from cancer to heart attacks to diabetes to loss of an eye, are really pretty enlightened. Now. That certainly wasn’t always true, and many pilot’s attitudes are firmly cemented 30 or 50 years in the past. Whether they learned that themselves long ago, or are just repeating the attitudes they were taught more recently by others steeped in Ye Olden Dayes.
But when it comes to mental health, the FAA is still much more rooted in that long gone past. One absolutely positively can report depression, get treated, recover, and go back to flying. In the last ~5 years before I retired my employer had a big ongoing propaganda effort to show everybody by personal testimonial all our coworkers who had done exactly that and were now happily back to flying.
The problem is that there is situational depression which is usually responsive to treatment (meds + counseling) and the passage of time. So recoverable from and flying-compatible after some time on the ground. There’s also more constitutional depression that can be medicated into a successful ordinary life situation, but cannot be gotten over and requires continual medication. And that one is not compatible with flying due to the meds.
Problem is, which do you have and how do you know in advance when you don’t dare consult a professional? Lots of folks with more constitutional depression can plug along OK until some major life setback occurs. Then they’re stuck in the depressive mode pretty much for life.
The social & familial consequences of COVID hit a LOT of such vulnerable folks very hard. Folks in every walk of life, not just pilots. But pilots of the right (AKA wrong) constitution fell victim as much as anyone else did.
It’s a mess, but the current state of the art / science of psych treatment doesn’t really support too much different from what FAA’s doing now. Given the medical uncertainties and limitations of extant treatments, for professionals the real answer is some sort of career insurance that is universal, affordable, and can’t be gamed into a lifetime of good wages for no work.
Absent that, we’re going to have closeted mental illness as surely as we’ll have sunshine and rain.
I wonder how much of the pilot shortage is due to ypung people taking disqualifying drugs? Adderall and other stimulant ADD drugs are disqualifying, and huge numbers of people take them.
This will likely affect the gender balance in aviation, as young women report WAY more mental illnesses than young men, but even in young men it’s pretty high.
I believe the numbers now are worse than in 2021 due to effects from lockdowns, school closures, etc.
At the professional level it seems the big filter is ability to spend $100K+ and not work for wages for 2 years. After getting a 2- and ideally 4-year degree.
At the hobbyist level that may well be an issue. And way back at the very lowest entry level, anyone hoping to turn pro would probably ask, or be asked, a lot of probing questions about health and drug consumption, both prescription and recreational. Lotta prospects might not like the answers they’re required to give.
How many airline pilots come up through the ranks of grassroots aviation these days? You know, get a PPL, fly around for a while building time, get a commercial, fly pipeline in a 172 or flight instruct to build hours, get a multi-IFR, get a job flying corporate or light cargo, etc.
As opposed to starting from scratch in a flight school that rakes you all the way to the right seat of some regional or something?
30 years aho, the first path seemed really common. That and ex-military going into commercial aviation. Have you seen a shift towards airline ab initio training among younger airline pilots?
At least one - my (now ex) nephew-in-law CFIed until he built the 1500 hours for ATP* and then got a job at Delta.
Brian
* Airline Transport Pilot
Pardo flew 132 missions in Vietnam with the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing. Saved his wingman. Finished the trip on the ground with his wingman evading capture
Quite a legend in combat avation.
RIP
I suspect this improvised maneuver is not taught in flight school. 
I thought this route would be most common.
If I were 18 and wanting to become a pilot I’d almost certainly join the US Air Force to get trained and experience.
I don’t know what portion of airline pilots came up this way, but the flight schools around here are full of people trying it. Friend son is just starting out on the road, just had a cousin’s son-in-law hired by Delta who did it this way.
IME, and that’s still fairly fresh, right now the solid majority of new major airline pilots are the grass-roots kind.
As of now the “zero to hero” academies are too small and too new to contribute more than about 10% of the headcount at the major level. I expect they’re more like 15% at the regional newbie level, and they are definitely the fastest growing source of airline pilots, both regional and later major. I have no doubt that in 5 or 10 years if current trends continue they will be the bulk of the intake to the regionals and also to the majors.
The military was the big source in the 1970s and before. In fact it was quite hard to get hired at many (not all) first-rate carriers via any other career path. By the end of the 1980s when I started the ex-military were roughly half. Some carriers still leaned hard towards ex-military while others had learned to lean the other way.
Now the ex-military pilots are down around 10-20% of newbies at the major level. And generally speaking those folks don’t go through the RJ stage; they go straight from teh service to the majors. At least in eras when the majors are hiring. Common exceptions being for folks who flew military helicopters or who’ve been out of aviation a few years. Or who have the misfortune to separate from the service at a time the majors aren’t hiring. But between 2015 and ~2030 that last wasn’t / won’t be a concern (except for COVID in 2020 & part of 2021). Or unless some new disaster shows up in the future.
Why the change? The major airlines are a vastly larger collective enterprise than they were in e.g. 1980, and the US military aviation is smaller now than it was then. The total demand for airline pilots far exceeds the supply of ex-military.
The other issue with military at that it used to be you could enter the service at age 22 right after your 4-year degree, serve 4 years of pure flying, and get out at age 26 to pursue an airline job. Now it’s finish your 4-year degree that probably took you 5, plus maybe you did a gap year after HS, and your minimum time in service is 12 years. So now you enter the military at perhaps age 24, and get out at 36.
Given the extreme returns to having a long career and the extreme returns to starting younger than your hiring-date peers so you’ll have many years at the higher seniority levels, that “lost decade” from age 26 to 36 makes being ex-military is a much less attractive value proposition than it was 40 years ago.
So nowadays the folks who want an airline career as such go get one of those directly without the gigantic and ultimately very costly detour of screwing around with the military for over a decade. Folks who want to do military aviation as a career, or as an experiment or lark or whatever, go for the military option.
In long-hindsight I’d probably have had a far better career had I never done USAF. And the tradeoff is stronger for folks starting now than folks starting in my era. In my case I did college in 4 years, got out the first day they’d let me, started at the airline a couple months later and turned 31 a couple months after that. had I been hired at 22 and had 9 years seniority already I’d have had a very different life. Or hired age 24 with 7 years. …
One group we do see now that we did not see before is retired career pilot-officers. Guys (almost all guys) who spent 25 or 35 years in the military and have retired as O-5s or more frequently O-6s. They’re about age 50, have driven a desk more than a jet the last 15 years, and have a steady lifetime pension & taxpayer-paid medical. They’re also a bit too young and a bit to ambitious, or at least high-performance, to settle down to life on a porch or a golf course. Yet.
So they’re content to have a relatively poor short airline career because it beats the alternative 2nd careers they might have as middle managers or ???. They’re often very mature folks with great people skills, but breaking them out of the military mold and filling them with the airline mindset and practical civil aviation learning can be a big job. They have a vast compendium of no-longer relevant aviation knowledge, and a vast amount they may or may not realize they don’t know yet and need to eagerly slurp up. By comparison working with a newbie who’s a former RJ Captain is a piece of cake.
Anecdotally I’m seeing a shift to flight schools. I hope it’s not true. There’s something to be said for people that A: enjoy flying as a hobby and B: have logged hours learning to fly over the years where non-book lessons are taught.
Contains a time lapse video of the P-8 rising from the shallows of Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Base. Plane is now parked with investigators and technicians evaluating the future of the airframe and equipment.
I’ll just point out that yesterday, Sun Dec 17 2023, was the 120th anniversary of the Wright brothers first successful flight.
A toast to Saint Orville and Saint Wilbur!