Eleven months of lessons. One empty right seat. A landing I am still slightly in disbelief I actually pulled off cleanly.
Eleven months into flight training, my instructor climbed out of the right seat this morning at our little regional airfield outside New Orleans, looked at me with a specific, calm confidence I have been chasing for nearly a year now, and simply said it was time for me to take the plane up alone, a sentence I had been anticipating for months and that still managed to catch me completely off guard the moment it actually arrived.
I will admit, honestly, that I cried a little before I even got the engine started, sitting there alone in the cockpit for the first time with no instructor beside me to catch any mistake I might make, staring at the same instrument panel I have looked at dozens of times over the past eleven months but that suddenly felt considerably more consequential now that the entire responsibility for reading it correctly rested with nobody but me. My instructor, watching from the ground, later told me he could tell exactly when I finally composed myself enough to actually taxi out, a detail I found both mortifying and, on reflection, genuinely sweet given how patient he has been with me across this entire long training process.
The flight itself, once I was actually airborne, felt considerably calmer than the anticipation leading up to it, three full laps around the traffic pattern, three landings, each one requiring a genuine, focused concentration that left almost no mental space left over for the nerves that had been building for the better part of the morning. There is something genuinely strange about flying an aircraft you have flown dozens of times before with an instructor beside you and discovering it feels like an entirely different, considerably more serious experience the moment that instructor is no longer physically present.
New Orleans from the air, even from the modest altitude a student pilot flies a traffic pattern at, offers a genuinely striking view I do not think I will ever fully get used to, the specific patchwork of the city and the surrounding wetlands laid out below in a way that no ground-level view of this place I have lived my entire life ever quite prepares you for. I found myself, somewhere in the middle of my second lap, genuinely grinning behind my own oxygen mask despite the concentration the actual flying required, a moment of pure, uncomplicated joy I have not experienced in quite this specific form in a long while.
My instructor met me on the ground afterward with the kind of quiet pride I imagine most flight instructors reserve specifically for exactly this milestone, and the small crowd of other students and mechanics who happened to be hanging around the hangar gave me the traditional, slightly embarrassing round of applause new solo pilots apparently always receive, along with the customary cutting of the back of my shirt, a tradition I had heard about many times over these eleven months but that felt genuinely surreal actually experiencing firsthand.
I have my written exam and considerably more flight hours still ahead of me before I can actually earn my full private pilot certificate, and I know today’s milestone, significant as it felt, is really only the beginning of a longer process rather than any kind of finish line. But I am allowing myself, tonight, to simply sit with today properly, framed shirt piece already sitting on my kitchen table, before I let the next stretch of training’s inevitable challenges start crowding back into my thinking tomorrow morning.
I called my mother the moment I landed, still sitting in the cockpit with the engine just switched off, and she cried too, over the phone, which set me off crying again despite having only just finished composing myself from the first round. She has been quietly nervous about this entire flight training process since I first mentioned wanting to learn nearly a year ago, a nervousness she has never fully voiced directly but that I have picked up on regardless in small, telling ways, and hearing her genuine, unguarded pride today, rather than the carefully managed worry she usually shows, meant more to me than I fully expected it would.
I think what today actually confirmed, beyond the simple technical milestone of flying solo for the first time, is that eleven months of showing up, week after week, through genuinely difficult stretches of training and no shortage of moments where I doubted whether I was actually cut out for this, has produced something real and durable rather than simply accumulated hours logged in a training record. I am, properly, becoming a pilot, a fact that still feels slightly surreal to type out even now, hours after actually landing that plane entirely on my own.
I am already looking ahead, somewhat nervously, toward the cross-country solo flights still waiting for me later in this training process, longer flights out beyond the familiar traffic pattern I flew today, navigating entirely on my own to airfields I have never actually landed at before. Today felt like the first genuine test of everything eleven months of lessons have built toward. I suspect it is simply the first of several such tests still ahead, each one, I imagine, carrying its own particular blend of nerves and eventual, hard-won pride once actually completed.
More from this author at Siobhan O’Donnell, prat.uk.