Reading Rich Bach's book, "THE GIFT OF WINGS".
I had been skydiving for eight years and was tired of just going up and
down. I was 26, single, had the time, had the money, so I did it.

I've always been interested but never really said "I definitely
want to do it.

I flew a ton for work for 2 years (3 time 1K with UA).

Then my friend's brother flew us from his home airport MMH (Mammoth, CA)
to San Diego Montgomery. Then he dropped me off at CLD (that is
the airline code, I forget the IATA code) which I flew out of
commericially a number of times. I thought that that was the coolest
flight of the year out of 100+ commericial.

I read a bunch of books, both technical and non-technical fun-stuff.

Then my friend, a UA pilot (A320, 777, 767) took me up in a
C152. More 'that is cool. I'm doing this.'

One day go to SQL (San Carlos, CA) and get a DISCO flight with
a CFI ferrying a plane 10 miles to PAO. I wasn't sure where
it was all leading but I went for it. Got my license a couple
of months ago on 12/17/03 (I say this all the time but I think
it will be cool to say for the rest of my life ). 30 plus
hours since that date, I started my IFR and after 2 times on
the sim I'm already doing oscar patterns (not great but fun).


And a further story, one day my CFI and I areclimbing out to a
practice area my CFI says, "when you're
not flying do you think a lot about flying?" Well I said,
"for about 5 weeks I flew with you on a monday, I then flew
somewhere with UA on Tuesday, back on
Thursday and then up with you on Friday. I'm at airports more than
you. of course I think about flying a lot."


Gerald Sylvester
PPL-ASEL (Instrument student) - total time of approx. 100 hours.
UA - Prem. Exec. - over 400,000 flown miles in the 5 years
(over 800 hours)