Hello aspiring (or current) pilots and welcome to the Inflight Student Pilot Blog. My name is Drew, and I am a brand-new student pilot at Inflight Pilot Training based out of Flying Cloud Airport (FCM) in Eden Prairie, MN. I’m working with the Inflight team to write a bi-weekly blog about my experience as a student pilot working towards earning my Private Pilot License (PPL). The goal of this blog is to provide a firsthand perspective on the journey to becoming a private pilot by sharing the ups and downs of the process, technical aspects of the training, some tips & tricks, and other information that a prospective or even current pilot might find useful. I am not 100% sure where this blog will ultimately lead me, but let’s hope it provides some insight and possibly even some entertainment along the way!
For the better part of a decade, I have had an itch for aviation that I haven’t scratched. Like the majority of pilots that have trained before me I have always had an interest in aviation, whether it be movies about aviation (find me a pilot that hasn’t seen Top Gun!), building model airplanes and rockets, flying on commercial airlines or reading books and magazines about it. I have known for over a decade that getting a PPL was an aspiration of mine, but that goal went unrealized as life events, the time commitment required, and the cost were barriers to getting started on my goal. This is not a unique situation based on my reading and discussions with other aspiring pilots, as there are so many valid reasons to put off flight training. I have a family with a wife and two young kids (and a third on the way), a demanding full-time job, and other commitments and interests that tend to keep me busy most weeks so my timing is not perfect and my schedule is far from wide open. However, I finally decided that even if the timing is not perfect, I am going to go for it. For many pilots, there is never a perfect time to start training, but I am barely a week in and I can already tell that the perfect time was 10 years ago as I’m kicking myself for not starting sooner. I am finally scratching my aviation itch and enjoying it even more than I expected so far!
