Ron Rapp, the blogger behind the House of Rapp, has written a lengthy essay about how he got into aviation as a pilot. The essay is lengthy because Ron’s life took a number of twists and turns where he crossed paths with aviation but did not dive right in. For instance: As a child, Ron’s mother took him on a memorable flight from Los Angeles to Missouri in 1977 to visit grandparents and the trip was made via a “shiny red and white” TWA Boeing 727 with everyone dressed up for the occasion (this was, after all, before “deregulation”). He even got his picture taken in the cockpit with the pilot.
Unfortunately, Ron’s parents passed away at an early age and he moved from Southern California to Alaska to live with relatives – one of whom had been hired by the FAA as a replacement Air Traffic Control Specialist after Reagan fired all the controllers who took part in the PATCO strike. However, it was not visits to FAA control rooms that got Ron into aviation.
What finally got Ron interested in Aviation? This is what he wrote:
It was 1998. I was driving down the street one day on the east side of John Wayne Airport for a reason I cannot recall (except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with aviation), and noticed a series of sky-blue awnings that said ‘Flight Training’.
Sometime between where the awning started and where it ended, I made the decision that yes, I was going to do that.
So he slammed on the breaks, pulled into the parking lot and never looked back. It also helped that Ron just happened to be at a point in his life where he had sufficient quantity of both time and money.
With Ron’s story in mind, we would like to ask our readers a simple or potentially difficult question: How or why did you get started in aviation?