Recently, I was reading up on some amphibious / float aircraft I was interested in operating on the river near Montreal. (I suffer from SAFWL - Seasonally Affective Floatplane Wanderlust.)

Naturally this is all fantasy talk, since f*&$%ing Google has not yet acquired our company. Until that time, I’ll spend a little bit of time talking with Jim …

at Northern Aircraft and generally wasting anyone’s time who sells float or amphibious aircraft. (This usually involves hours of fantastic theories about untapped markets that are *just* outside Montreal / Toronto and how my spreadsheet, brilliant flying and strong work ethic will see me through a summer of profitability…. then I wake up.. sweating and shaking, yet eager to try it nonetheless.)

Then something something amazing caught my eye: An advertisment for a PC-6 job. (The PC-6 was featured in Air America where Mel Gibson does some fairly macho flying onto mountain tops in Laos.)

Offering his services, worldwide, was a reasonably high time pilot, claiming that anywhere was “ok” as long as the job involved flying a PC-6. That’s right… he’ll sit in a known Ebola “hot zone,” so long as he can just get to touch a PC-6 every day.

Here is an screenshot of what I found under “Pinboard” on www.pc-6.com:

By the email you’ve probably already guessed that it is an ex-Rafale driver (that is a French fighter plane for USA centric warplane buffs.) But the amazing thing is that the tailwheel flying, the STOL, the “something” has this person so obsessed with the aircraft that they’ll move anywhere as long as they can “drive” that airplane type.

Imagine that…. You’ll move anywhere… as long as there is a PC-6 waiting there for hours of (most likely) low wage flying. Strange, but true.

So the next question is - how crazy are we? Are pilots some of the most obsessive people around? Or are there car, motorocycle or boat people that have the passion / disease stronger than we do?

The conclusion might be that we are in the top five, if not the at the top of the heap of the crazy. The flying folk are also the most passionate and quite likely some of the most obsessive. I greatly welcome challenges to this notion (in the comments below), since I would like to discover other similar species.

Reply if I am missing some obvious ones like golf, motorcycle, … or, you know, badminton. Then ask yourself, will they move there to whack that birdie for money?

A quick word about www.pc-6.com: For the PC - 6 this site is its own little ancestry.com. They track who bought it, when, where it went, who the next owner was… etc. … for every single PC-6 built. The sequence of owners, paint jobs, environments is all catalogued. How’s that for passion?

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