the bennymay story: chapter 5

The Key is Motivation

—braiding some loose threads—

How do you decide what you’re going to do for the rest of your life? How does anyone choose?

My mum tells me, at age three I informed her, ‘I’m going to be an astronaut and an inventor.’ Uncle Bob held me up above adult eye-level to peer in through a window to see the Shuttle not long before NASA officially publicised it. When I learned to walk, I walked the length of the Saturn V. The career path to flying the Shuttle is similarly long. To score a job flying spacecraft it helps to have a science degree and, of course, to be a NASA test pilot. To get there, it helps to be a military test pilot. That means being in the military and probably being a fast-jet pilot—such as a fighter pilot. To become a top fighter pilot, one will spend three and a half months watching Top Gun four to five times a day, will need to be able to fly, and will need to be able to think as a fighter, and as a pilot. Also, he (or she?) will need to be medically fit and healthy. At least, at age seventeen, when I reviewed the life-plan I’d formulated at age three, that is what I thought.

I reviewed all my plans and desires. From age fourteen to seventeen I wanted to have a 1960 MGA—a curvy, two seat British sports car. I had been saving my pennies since I was about four. I was about four years old when I began working on dad’s farm roads and airstrip—getting one cent each for collecting metal or glass fragments, and half a cent for other foreign objects—a job that taught me to observe very carefully. As I grew older my pay rate bulged to a few dollars per hour. So after many hundreds of hours of chipping, driving tractors, bulldozers, forklifts, graders etcetera, but then having ‘invested’ in model aeroplanes, a motorbike, helmet and leathers, I had saved a little over a thousand dollars. I sacrificed my MGA dream, as well as piano, trombone, and dreams of learning drums, of getting a better water-ski (than the one I’d found), of a new motorbike, going sky diving, and a bag full of other adventurous desires, so I could learn to fly. CPL flying training (not including the associated university fees, and loss of income from not working) was going to cost over $20,000. I took the risk and borrowed the money, planning to repay it once I got a flying job. (Rather than make you wait many chapters to find out, I’ll tell you now: I repaid that debt at the end of my first year working in the air force).

The wisdom of knowledgeable, old men, such as of Frank Hadley, was that the future aviation industry (at least in its most competitive stratum) would require pilots to have a science degree, so I would do well to obtain one. I was convinced, and in 1994, moving my swag from Sydney to Newcastle, I began to tackle both my Commercial Pilot’s Licence (CPL) training and a science degree. That addressed the flying- and career aspects of my plan, but did little to teach me to think like a fighter.

In 1994 I sprinted down and leapt off the cliff of financial stability, hoping the tiny trampoline of flying training and tertiary education would bounce me back into the stratosphere. This meant I would have to study—and study hard—to make aviation work for me. The notion that I would fail was so unaffordable, I squeezed it out of sight by working and studying.

My love of flying, my desire to have a long-term career as a pilot, my lifetime of aviation—including basic training from my pilot-father in everything from aircraft materials to how to use your eyes to scan for targets—and now also a huge financial debt (read ‘financial threat’), all combined into one very large truckload-full of motivation to work—motivation to succeed. How did I know I would succeed? Since I had wed my life with this goal: of working until I succeeded.

Jason ‘bok’ Choy laughed almost non-stop through our six, high school years in Sydney. Jase and I shared a house, with some other guys, at the end of school. Jase’s huge heart and overflowing joy was balanced a fairly quiet demeanour, so he was a good housemate. I was happy to bump into him in early 1994, when I realised he also had moved to Newcastle for uni. What surprised me (and everyone who knew) was that Bok Choy had begun Kung Fu training.

As Jason and I entered the den of incessant warfare, I turned to my left, trying to find the 300 pound human muscle beating blood out of a punching bag or a small child—but I did not see him. I turned to my right, seeking out skinheads with Romper Stomper tatt’s, wielding baseball bats with nails—but they weren’t there that night. The training instructor was talking in maths, physics and biomechanics, to a group of students—an apparently variegated group, yet predominantly conservative. Kung Fu did not accord with my expectations. I returned the next night, and the next, and became increasingly interested. After a few hundred hours of such training (and no more back pain) I was learning to think like a fighter.

© Benjamin May 2009

Go to chapter 6.

Footnote: In the past decade, many have asked me, ‘is it difficult to get accepted into the air force as a pilot?’ I’d tell them, ‘I think it is almost impossible if you’re not the person they are looking for; but relatively easy if you are—and if you are extremely motivated.’ (Whether that’s true I don’t know, but it was my perception in the late 1990s.)