As I waited for my flight to board from Delhi to Istanbul, I saw the pilots walk through the gate doors. What I saw made me a bit sad. It reminded me how little pilots are really paid for doing heir jobs. Something I learned when pilots were blamed and accused for causing some plane crash a couple years ago. I don't remember the exact story, so you'll have to trust me on the fact (as I just stated it to be right now because it's what I believed to be accurate and true in the purest sense) that pilots are heavily underpaid.
The ability to fly and soar the sky is something that human kind has desired for a long time. Heck there's even a story about how quick one can burn if they fly too close to the sun. So you know that something is important to us when we make up a cautionary tale around it.
When the Orville brothers invented human flight (more like "figured out"), it was a big deal. The first plane to fly people across a short distance was a big deal. The first journey across the Atlantic by air was a huge deal. Even today we celebrate a person achieving long distances through flight, albeit now we're talking more about how we do it (most recently: fully electric planes) than who did it.
The point I'm getting to is this: we've commoditized human flight. Marginalized it. Made it from an accomplishment to a job. A job we pay very little for. And an experience we want to pay lower and lower for, so much so that these days we end up paying more for our cabs to and from the airport than the actual flight between the cities.
Last year, when I turned 25, I decided that I would get a pilot license by the time I'm 30. Not because it as ever a dream for me to fly one day, but because when I turned 25 I thought about how amazing it would be to fly a humangous machine through the skies. I'm not expecting a job out of it, I just want to fly my own fucking plane when I go on vacations!
Several people - thousands and probably millions - grow up with that dream from a much earlier age. But sadly their dreams get diluted into jobs. Low paying jobs where people clap when you do it like you're supposed to.
Imagine receiving - not always, but sometimes - a lukewarm applause the next time you do your job correctly. Some dream.
Anyway, end of cynical thoughts. Or as I should really label it - drunken thoughts.
Maybe I'll make a category for that on Launchora. It would certainly help me reach my 100 stories published goal by next July.
This is story #4, being published from Berlin, on day 2 of my 25 day euro tour.