When I was in the Air Force, there was a term that brought fear into every pilot’s heart. “Non-current.” There was a long laundry-list of skills as an Air Force pilot, that you were expected to maintain by actually doing them. Some skills were used often, like landing the aircraft you were qualified in. Some skills were silly and hopefully never used, like: landing an airplane after nuclear war, while wearing a chemical suit and a life preserver. The fear for the pilots of going non-current was because if they went non-current on a skill, they had to be re-trained in the skill as if they had never done it before. This was usually a much more painful process than just doing “the thing.”
In the example of the nuclear war scenario, doing the thing, meant an instructor pilot whispering in your ear, “Boom, boom! Uh oh! Mushroom clouds ahead! What does that mean? Get your suit on! Brush up your rowboat skills!” He would tell you everything was “simulated,” which in this case, is another word for imaginary . You would then land the airplane as normal but you would be current on TNWCSRB ops(thermo-nuclear war chemical suit rowboat operations). Which was way less painful than having to spend half a day in class, getting in and out of a chemical suit and learning the history of nuclear war rowboat doctrine or whatever ludicrous skill on the list of 10,000 you were expected to maintain.
After the Air Force, I haven’t really had to worry about going non-current: As a commercial pilot, you fly so much, and the skills you are expected to maintain are so much less (sorry passengers, the majority of your pilots aren’t going to know what to do in a nuclear war), that you never go non-current. That is, until now.
I am as a non-current as you can get. Not in any one skill, like landing at night or taking off with one engine, I am non-current on being a pilot! Not only have I not touched an airplane for almost a year, I haven’t been to an airport in that time. I have forgotten what airplanes look like, not to mention the security lines, the delayed flights, the stress that buzzes through an airport as part of its existence. All of it has been gracefully absent from my life for almost a year.
I have spent the last year, mostly holed up in my house, staring out my window. I have gotten way better at guitar, started writing a novel, spent three and a half months becoming a full-stack computer programmer, but haven’t thought much about airplanes. I definitely can’t fly one. I can barely drive my car. Every time I make a grocery run, I find myself having to concentrate on the basics, like stopping, signaling, and staying in one lane. I can’t imagine what it will be like to operate machinery in three dimensions again.
So why do I write this? Because I have a training notice. I report in the next week for a month of training to learn a whole new aircraft. As I crack the books and try to get back in the mindset, I find myself struggling to comprehend what I am reading. Why are there so many acronyms? What am I reading? Did I ever understand any of it? The same thought keeps popping up in my head: Damn! Being a pilot is hard! Did one year of not flying, erase 19 years of experience? Maybe. Stay tuned. We’ll find out. In the mean time, I have to shave my beard and go non-current as an aspiring computer programmer/ street musician.
