"Adam Smith " Avstry #11

Adam tells us about the AOPA's Center to Advance the Pilot Community, as well as his time directing the EAA AirVenture Museum, and flying in Scotland.

Transcript source: http://www.avstry.com/transcript.jsp?id=11

Partial Transcript

J.R. Warmkessel: Welcome Adam. I always actually like to start these conversations by talking about your pilot's licenses, so maybe you could tell me what license you actually hold, and then we can talk about how you got them.

Adam Smith: Well, I'm very happy to talk about my pilot's licenses because I just got a new one last week. Last Wednesday I got my instrument rating. I've been working on that all summer. But basically, I am a private pilot with an instrument rating I've flown a lot of tailwheel and I've done some aerobatic flying and things like that. I may be slightly unusual in the fact that I've gone through the private pilot checkride on both sides of the Atlantic. I learned to fly in Scotland and then when I moved to America it just made sense to go through the same process again because it got me out of a lot of difficult recurrency stuff.

J.R. Warmkessel: Congratulations on your new certificate. That's always a badge of honor. The instrument is a very challenging credential to get.

Adam Smith: I certainly found it that way. For me it was something that I wanted to do as part of a sort of a longer mission I'm on to get my CFI rating. I got my real start in aviation in Scotland when someone who's become a very good friend offered to teach me to fly for free. You know, Jim gave me an amazing gift there. It's come to be a huge part of my life and my passion and a little while ago I was thinking, you know, I should pay that gift forward. I'd like to teach someone to fly for free. And so if I'm ever going to do that I need to get my instrument, my commercial, and my CFI, so getting my instrument was actually the first step on that journey for me. But actually, now that I've gone through it, I think it's actually turning out to be a lot more useful than just a stepping stone to a CFI. I really appreciate the dimension that it's brought to my flying, the sort of precision and the sort of thinking ahead element to it, so it's nice to have that extra capability I get.

J.R. Warmkessel: Let me take us back to the beginning. Tell us about getting your license in Scotland and how that whole thing came about.

Adam Smith: My life and aviation did not collide until my mid-twenties. When I was growing up it just never crossed my mind to be a pilot. In fact, my grandmother used to make us promise never to do dangerous things and she would sort of make her grandchildren sort of faithfully promise that we would never rock climb or we would never own a motorcycle. And I don't think it ever crossed my grandmother's mind that I would fly, because she would definitely have made me promise never to do it. Growing up in Britain, aviation is a very distant thing for most people. There was no local airports for general aviation, and you don't see airplanes overhead, you don't know any pilots. It was just a thing that didn't even cross my consciousness I guess. And basically my whole life I have been passionate about history. I pursued a path through school, history was always my favorite subject and I studied a degree in modern history in England, and then I did a degree in museum studies in Scotland. And basically all of my early jobs were in museums. So I did a coal mining museum, and a farming museum, and golf museum in St. Andrews. And then one day I got a job running the National Museum of Aviation in Scotland. It's a lovely museum if you ever go over there. It's about 25 miles to the east of Edinburgh, based on an old World War I and World War II airfield. So basically this love of history that I had led me to a job in an aircraft museum and that's where the intersection of aviation and my life came into being. Because suddenly I found myself surrounded by a very noticeable passion and a group of people that were very deeply embedded in the history and culture of aviation. You know, it was very striking, and even things like taking children around the aviation museum. It's actually very hard to get kids interested in Victorian farming methods and things like that. And I did notice when I started taking kids through the aircraft museum it was quite special because you had their attention and they were very engaged and interested in what you were doing. So I think I knew instantly that I was involved in something that was quite attractive to me, attractive to my spirit. So I started hanging out with airplane people, learning their language and things like that. And that basically led to this conversation that I already referred to, in 1997. And I can date it pretty precisely because I was drowning my sorrows after some trouble with a woman and my friend Jim sort of said, I'm going to cheer you up, my friend, and teach you to fly for nothing. The deal was I bought a share in a Piper L4 which was painted in World War II markings. A lot of Americans don't know this, but over in Britain, and I think across Europe, the shared ownership of airplanes is much more prevalent than it is in the United States. If you were to pick up a British aviation magazine you'll tend to find more ads for shares in airplanes than you will find for whole airplanes. And so I bought into this co-group, relatively affordable, you're a one-fifth owner so there's an equity stake you buy and then the costs of hangarage and insurance and things are spread between five people. It's purely a coping strategy that's evolved to deal with the high cost of aviation over there. Even today it is, as a rule of thumb, about four times more expensive to fly in Britain than it is in America. I got into this group and I learned to fly. I guess interestingly, one of the advantages of a good aircraft group or flying club is you get sort of community aspect or the social environment. All the people that were in our airplane group became good friends and we would socialize together, and I actually ended up marrying one of them. So for me, I bought an airplane and ended up getting a wife out of the deal as well. Janet and I have got a shared passion for aviation. At the time she was an airline pilot for British Midland flying out of Edinburgh, and then she came over to America with me in 2001 when we came to live in Oshkosh.