Kids on board

Well done

My feelings about it are mixed. On the one hand, it only sounds logical that a child used to flying from day one will always be at ease in the plane and in the skies. OTOH I have been keeping my grandsons away from the plane until they are 6 or 7 – big enough to have SOME control of there p-requirements and also their ears will be less delicate, as a musician I care for that. My main reason, though, has been that it is nice to have them live up to the experience. They now live with “if you are really a BIG boy, granddad will take you up for a tour flying, just you and me, in our very own aeroplane” – that does make their eyes glow, I can tell you. If they only take it for normal, where is the thrill?

My father (PPL) first took me for a flight at six weeks old, so I have grown up flying. Apparently when I was very young, I used to fall asleep but when I was older, as well as looking out of the window, I liked to listen and try to make some sense of what was being said on the RT.

Now, decades later, I don’t appear to have a hearing problem (and as a child we didn’t even have headsets – as the aircraft used to have a handheld mic) – well, so far anyway…

I can honestly say that I never took flying for granted and would accompany my Dad whenever I got the opportunity, despite the fact that it usually meant helping to clean the aircraft afterwards. Even now, with my very own PPL, I still consider it such a privilege to go flying – I love it just as much as I did as a kid (hence my moniker)!

Jan_Olieslagers wrote:

[…] where is the thrill?

In our case we don’t want any thrill :-)

The airplane is simply a means of transportation to get from A to B. Instead of queuing up at the baggage counter, at security and later wait for the bags to arrive we just get on board and be on our way.

In the end our 7 years old daughter believes that it is normal. Which is a good thing. She’s been flying CAT from very early on and now for 2 years with small planes with daddy being the pilot. With the family I stay at or below FL120 so they don’t need O2 and I keep the legs short enough but we have done 4 hours in one go. Descents are 1000ft/m and we have flown through IMC for hours. Nobody complained. We even had a little “situation” and everybody kept their cool.

I should add that we rarely talk about “to go flying”. We talk about going to destination X instead.

My kids flew as babies already, my son when he was about 4 months old … see photo. THat was when my wife still flew :-)

I like that photo. It’s a really good example of the utility value of a GA plane. Like the family station wagon :-)

Oh… Frequently when people learn that I fly myself to places I get asked “Is that allowed? You can just fly?”. I would love to show them pictures like that one.

And you know, our son (and later our daughter) had absolutely no problem with it. We covered his ears (under the hat) and he used to sleep all the time. Especially above 5000 feet he’d sleep fine ;-))

Some really great stories above

I went up, age about 7, in a Morava 200 (?) twin, out of Pribram LKPM

It “belonged” to the head of the Czech uranium mining industry, Karel Bocek. He was apparently keen to “make progress with” my mum, but my dad wasn’t happy about it and anyway she didn’t go along with it. Damn… we would have got that B&W TV a year earlier had she done that! Bocek, perhaps the most trusted of all the trusted communists, escaped to the West in the 1970s, in a truck.

But I didn’t think much of flying till many years later…

(The Morava 200 is a beautiful airplane)