Patrick: Hi, I’m Patrick Reid, Autism News NetWORK, and I’m here with Nick Carden. He is a pilot here at Boeing. What was pilot school like?

Nick Carden: So when I talk about pilot training with the military, I talk about three things. One, I talk about a fire hose. Can you imagine trying to drink water out of a fire hose? I mean, it’s just a massive amount of water right in your face. That’s kind of how pilot training is. My pilot train it was approximately two years long, and I remember the first six months being like a fire hose of information and what we call general knowledge. We talk about communications, aircraft systems, air traffic control, emergencies, weather, and they expect you to become expert on all of this stuff in a very short period of time. So I just remember it just being just constant, constant, constant information and studying at seven days a week. There was hardly any breaks. Very rarely did we stop to enjoy ourselves because we were back into the next subject, expected to learn more, expected to perform.

It was fast and with an immense amount of pressure to perform, you are consistently and constantly graded amongst all your peers. So when I joined the class, there were 30 of us, and from day one when you start performing, they rank you from number one in the class all the way down to 30, and every day that you perform and how you perform, they continue to grade you and you continue to move up and down those 30. So they expect you to perform, and at the end of it, those who do not get cut from the bottom. So you can imagine working for so long and then you just don’t make the cut at the end or don’t perform along the way. So there’s a lot of pressure.

So the first part is a fire hose, the second part is an absolute pressure perform, but the third part is my favorite, is the lasting friendships and bonds that you make with my classmates. Now nearly 20 years later and I still am very close to a lot of these individuals that I went to pilot training with. We all went to the military, we all went through very difficult situations in the military, and obviously a lot of difficult situations in pilot training. That bond and that friendship, they’re like family to me. And that’s kind of the good thing about pilot training, it pushes you out of your comfort zone, it pushes you into intense situations, so that when you do that it’s amazing how much you rushed back to the family, rushed back to your friends. So, that is my third thing from pilot training. If I could share that more than anything, that’s what I took the most out of it.

Patrick: Yeah, that sounds awesome.

Nick Carden: Yeah, great question.