Aviation

As 2025 comes to an end, I’ve been thinking about my own journey to gaining my commercial pilot licence and multi-engine instrument rating. With all my (in)experience of 300 hours total time flying aeroplanes, below are my thoughts and tips for getting your commercial pilot licence. Your mileage may vary.

But first (and I will come back to this point throughout), if your goal is to fly aeroplanes and potentially earn money flying aeroplanes, then you have a long-term goal that will require a significant short-to-medium-term investment in terms of both time and money. This time and financial investment has to be sustainable - not just for you, but potentially for your support network as well.

In mid 2022 I was presented with an amazing opportunity through no effort of my own: VMware, the company I worked for, announced it was being acquired by a non-remote, non-open-source-oriented multi-national in a somewhat lengthy 18 month process. As a fully-remote staff engineer on an open-source project I estimated a 75 to 90 percent probability that I’d receive a redundancy in around 18 months time.

A redundancy, really? An amazing opportunity? This post is a personal reflection and reminder to my future self to step back and evaluate the potential opportunities that a situation provides. I’m currently using this opportunity to weave three passions of mine into a possible future of software engineering with Rust on quantum computing projects and piloting aeroplanes on the side. Sure, reality may force me to compromise in one way or another in time, but for now I’m leaving my options open.

The 8th day of our course was completely blown out weather-wise with no possibility of flying, which is unfortunate as most of us only need to do some ridge soaring hours practising the give-way rules of the air and get more experience doing our reverse launches on our own in varying conditions. On the 9th day some of us were able to do a brief ridge soar after our theory test, but it was only by staying an extra day that I was able to get in the air for a longer period and demonstrate ridge soaring in traffic.

There’s some windy weather headed this way for the weekend, so our aim for the day was to get as much practise in as we could, which is exactly what we did - a day without theory classes! We left around 7:45 as planned to head up to the north launch and got 4 flights in before the wind died, landing in the East paddock. In the evening we managed another 3 flights from the west and south launches, the last one into the sunset!

We started the day at 7:45 heading up the hill in the basher to the North launch at Mt Borah again. After our first flight to the triange paddock we began doing solo flights so that after takeoff, Godfrey hands us over to the landing-site instructors, Karl and Bob, but they only use the radio if necessary. On my last flight for the morning I got to fly with another student all the way from Mt Borah back to the paddock outside the headquarters building! The afternoon saw us doing more reverse inflation ground handling as well as some more theory for landing approaches and handling injuries.

The winds just wouldn’t cooperate today, even for learning reverse launches in the paddock. We all got up ready to go, packed ourselves into the basher 4WD with our gear in the trailer, but didn’t even leave. The winds at the top of the mountain were getting stronger rather than weaker over the previous half-an-hour, so that it was currently gusts of 30km/h or 8m/s. So we came inside to do more theory: this time learning about wind gradients, turbulence and strategies for judging whether you’ll clear obstacles. We did head out to the paddock before lunch to learn reverse launches with Bob, but the wind in the paddock then died down so we couldn’t practise the new skill, so more theory instead. We headed out to the paddock again in the late afternoon when the wind had picked up a bit but again it died off on us and we were left standing there “parawaiting”.