During his senior year of high school in Seattle, Wash., Dr. Kevin Ware came across a classified ad in the aviation section of a local newspaper that read: “guaranteed to solo: $99.”
He was making just $1.25 an hour as a gas station attendant in 1964 but figured he could afford flight school training. He earned his pilot's license by the time he graduated from high school.
“After that, I realized that I had a hobby that I couldn't afford,” recalled Dr. Ware, a family and emergency physician based in Seattle, who left full-time practice 10 years ago to work as a cruise ship physician and return to flying professionally. “I thought that I might as well get enough flying time and a pilot rating, so I could at least get this hobby to pay for itself.”
By the time he turned 24, he had logged more than 4,000 hours of flying time, earned a commercial pilot's license, and become a certified flight instructor. The money he made from flying clients to various locales and from teaching flight instruction helped pay his college tuition at the University of Washington, Seattle, and medical school bills at Des Moines University, in Iowa.
The summer after his first year of medical school, he got a job flying a corporate airplane for a corn seed company. He also had a stint flying Iowa's lieutenant governor during his campaign. One day, the itinerary involved flying him to Davenport in time for the evening news from the opposite end of the state. “The problem is, across Iowa in the afternoon in the summer you get a lot of thunderstorms and a lot of really rough air,” said Dr. Ware, whose father was an aircraft engineer in the Royal Air Force during World War II. “When we got to Davenport, the TV cameras were all set up for [the lieutenant governor's] arrival. He got off the airplane as green as anything.”
Dr. Ware, who owns a helicopter and a twin-engine Cessna airplane, said that the skills he learned as a pilot suited him well for a career in medicine. “Flying taught me procedural discipline and a level of self-confidence, particularly when circumstances get difficult, that is hard to obtain from any other endeavor,” he said. “Flying also involves a high level of hand-eye coordination, coupled with the ability to apply academic knowledge. All of these translate well to medicine.”
He emphasized that flying “is not inherently safe.” he said. “You can only make it safe by being very careful about what you're doing, by knowing what you're doing, and by taking information you've acquired academically and intellectually and applying it.”
Despite the inherent risks that come with flying, little rattles him. “If you do it right, you don't get scared,” he said.
He pointed out that flying has become safer and less stressful in recent years because of the advent of satellite-downloaded weather radar and GPS navigation systems. Also, annual simulator training currently is a routine requirement for professional pilots “and is a learning process medicine should copy,” he said. “If I go to a CME course in medicine, and I go to the equivalent of a CME course in aviation, the aviation CME is more effective and practical. They really do teach you how to fly those airplanes in bad situations.”
Dr. Ware noted that flying smaller aircraft enables him to see things most other people don't, such as the scores of grizzly bears he and he wife spotted while dotting the coast of Alaska north of Ketchikan, as well as a sizable portion of the Lewis and Clark expedition, from the Missouri River to Oregon.
Why Not Fly the Real Thing?
Fifteen years ago, Dr. David Araujo was operating a radio-controlled glider plane with a good friend when it occurred to him: “Why not try to fly the real thing?”
On a subsequent vacation in Oahu, Hawaii, he visited a soaring site for gliders–also known as sail planes–and took a ride.
He was hooked.
When he returned to his then-home in southern California, he took lessons at a gliding site in nearby Hemet and earned a license to pilot the craft. Nowadays, he flies 1-2 times a month, usually at a gliding site in Hollister, Calif., about 80 miles from his current home in northern California. He describes engineless air travel as an intellectual challenge.
“In gliding, the goal is to stay up as long as you can, whereas for people who pilot power planes, their interest is more in visiting different places,” said Dr. Araujo, who directs the family medicine residency program at Mercy Medical Center in Merced. “You have to search for forms of air lift, and you're constantly gauging how far away you are from where you're going to land versus your altitude. The other side of it is that it's just you up there all alone. You have to concentrate on what you're doing so you forget about all the other stuff: hassles, stresses, work, or whatever. You're able to put everything away and aside for a period of time. It's a good mental release and relaxation.”