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Saturday, May 27, 2006 

Bersyukur

Syukur is a Malay word meaning "being thankful". I visited a cousin of mine today who is also aspiring to be a pilot. He started flying since he's sixteen. Nine years later he still hasn't managed to be a full fledged professional pilot. In Australia, pilot wannabes have it tough. There isn't an ab-initio program such as the one that I'm going through. They have to slog it through, paying for each and every hour of flight time, which isn't cheap at all. Now it costs two hundred aussie dollars for an hour on a single engine plane. To give an idea on how much it'll cost at the end, I needed to do a minimum of a hundred and seventy hours on a single engine plane. Twin engine hours are another forty and that would cost around four hundred an hour. This doesn't include certification exam fees and such. Alot of aussie pilots, my instructors included, took on extra jobs to fund their initial flying careers since companies won't hire pilots with minimum flying hours. It's a long and hard road for them. I am very thankful that I don't have to go through all that to realize my career.