Undecided rather to pursue a career in flying

Airline Pilot Questions & Answers
1

What advice would you give to a 25-year-old considering a career in flying but struggles in mathematics? I’m currently earning a bachelor’s degree in business management with a welding certification. I have been looking into getting an a&p or a career in flying.

Thanks.

2

Jackson,

My advice/question is have you ever flown in a small training airplane? If the answer is no there no point pondering a career until you do. Many people believe they want to fly but until you’ve actually been up with your hands on the controls you really won’t know (it’s VERY different than sitting in the back going on vacation).

With that in mind Id suggest you take an intro flight or lesson (or 3) and see where you’d be spending the next few years on your journey. You may love it but you may not.

Adam

3

Jackson,

If you have no prior flight experience in a small airplane like a Cessna, Diamond or Piper, how can you say you want to pursue the career? As Adam mentioned, it’s an extremely different feeling being a passenger to being in control of an airplane.

For the mathematics, we do simple math, I’d say basic algebra, nothing more than simple division and multiplication. While there are times you have to be quick with your calculations, we all have calculators on our PED’s and can “plug in formulas” to get the calculations we need. You just have to do it in a timely manner.

4

Jackson,

I am awful at math, particularly higher level math. The good news is that as pilots, we use very little of this.

As the others suggested, the best thing you could do would be to take an introductory flight and see if aviation is really for you.

Chris

5

Your airline clearly has a better payroll system than mine as I do higher math monthly to try and figure out my paycheck! :wink:

Adam

1 Like
6

It is pretty good, I rarely find errors.

Chris

7

Jackson,

As long as you can compute basic arithmetic you’ll be fine. To most people’s surprise we really don’t do use a lot of math beyond that. In training you’ll use it some learning the basics of manual XC flight planning but once you get to the airlines we’ve got flight computers to do that for us!

Hannah