One feels inclined at the onset of one’s novitiate to purchase a lot of equipment that is supposedly needed by pilots. Typical items include large chronometers with concentric dials crowded with numbers; digital watches giving Zulu time; fancy sunglasses; aluminium computers that can figure out drift angle and Mach corrections; electronic calculators specially intended for pilots; chart cases; plastic place mats made of aeronautical charts; aeronautical cuff links and ties; copies of the inescapable poem High Flight printed on imitation parchment with burny edges glued to a piece of wood similarly damaged; “pilots’ belt buckles”; magazine subscriptions; and, as they say in the ads, much, much more. None of this stuff is worth a damn. Beginners are persuaded to persuaded to buy the items in the belief that flying is going to be a complex, specialized, demanding activity that will require them, or that all pilots have them. There may also be an element of vanity involved, and the primitive notion that when you possess all the paraphernalia of a pilot, you are a pilot….
So much for equipment. We are a nation of compulsive buyers, and the temptation to equip ourselves for every activity is almost irresistible. So if we want to go out into the wilderness we buy hundreds of dollars worth of down bags, weightless backpacks, lunar boots, transustantiated foods, and titanium cookware only to meet on the trail a whistling man with a dog, a ranger who has lived there all his life who is on a three-day, eighty-mile circuit of cabins with an army surplus bag on his back, a sack of rice, some cans of soup, and a package of Oreos. He is wearing sneakers. It is the same with aviation. A beginner spends a hundred dollars on a lot of gadgets and only later, slowly, does it dawn on him that his instructor, who has four thousand hours and flew Crusaders on carriers, has nothing but a Timex with a broken band in his pocket and a ballpoint pen in his shirt.
