Hello! My name is David Silchman, I am a pilot, and I fly a Falco F.8L, a Piper Cherokee and a Cessna 172.
The summer of 2013, Bob Meder and I, decided that the main airport in the region should have a flight school and rental of aircraft, so we decided to re-start the Nebraska Flight Center, a flight training operation, at Eppley Airfield in Omaha, Nebraska… But let’s start from the beginning.
Years ago, after doing a thorough review of my life, I decided that what I really wanted more than anything else was to fly.
My story is typical of many middle aged individuals who had always had the urge of flight in them, but the responsibilities of “real life” always took precedence.
When I was a small kid I took my first airplane ride in a DC-3 from Tucson, Arizona, to Washington DC, and I was hooked. Afterwards, I have spent a lot of time looking up, admiring and envying the birds. When I was growing up in the southwestern desert I remember sitting by the window in school and watching the turkey vultures spend hours up there, effortlessly and elegantly flying in circles.
In kindergarten our teacher asked the class: If we were an animal, what animal would we be? All my classmates chose fierce, cool animals, like lions, tigers, wolves or pumas. When it was my turn, I said I wanted to be a turkey vulture. Needless to say, it didn’t go well, and I never got the chance to explain.
When I was in college, I was at a club with some friends and somehow I ended up talking to an older gentleman (older back then meant probably late thirties), who happened to be a professional pilot, flying small propeller planes at the time.
When I told him that I was a university student, he said that he had already gone to school and under pressure from his parents graduated with a medical degree. Immediately afterwards he gave his diploma to his father and went to flight school to follow his true vocation. He never practiced medicine. He was now flying people around in small planes in an air taxi operation.
I didn’t say anything to him, but for years I thought that he had wasted a good education in a “real” profession. How can someone turn his back to being a “Doctor” to go and become a glorified taxi driver? I would never do that, I thought to myself.
So I graduated from school and became a pediatrician, got married and raised a family and did the responsible thing and worked hard to fulfill my obligations as a responsible adult. All those years, I kept looking up and dreamed of flying.
to be continued…