Here"s the short version of how I figured this out...
When I graduated college I taught grade school for a few years before deciding I wanted to go to law school. I was drawn to the idea of making some big bucks and enjoying the prestige of being an attorney. So I left my third grade classroom and spent a year discovering that law school, while certainly fascinating, really wasn"t for me.
Once I realized what I could look forward to as an attorney I decided I just couldn "t see myself working 12 - 18 hour days for some law firm, putting myself in an early grave and not really enjoying myself along the way.
I realized it didn "t matter how big the bucks might be or how good I might look in a three piece suit (ha!). I knew I needed to be out experiencing the great big wide world and not slaving away in the dusty bowels of some law firm, kissing corporate butt while working my way up to junior partner.
Fortunately by about the same time that I first began applying to law schools I had already begun to learn how to fly airplanes. This was a direct result of growing up with a father who had always loved anything that flew.
After returning from a stint as a B-29 gunner during WWII he married my mother and they began making babies at a ferocious rate (eventually there were 9 of us). Before long he got his private pilot"s license and soon began to take his kids for airplane rides now and then.
Growing up I must have heard him speak in detail for hundreds of hours (maybe thousands) about the airplanes, people and stories that made aviation come alive for me.
