Flying Thrills but Instructors Remain Grounded in Reality : Careers: Teaching would-be pilots involves long hours and often mediocre pay, but the intangible benefits are most uplifting.

It’s hard to imagine that anything much could rattle flight instructor Dave Gold.

Though some might find it unnerving to step into a single-engine Cessna with students who don’t know an altimeter from an odometer, he professes to find little stress in the airspace above Burbank Airport.

“I once had a student freeze at the controls. He wouldn’t let go,” Gold recalled. “We were in a still condition and starting to spin. I gave him a good hard poke in the ribs. He let go.”

Keeping students up in the air preoccupies nearly every daylight moment of the owner of Burbank-based Bengal Air. He’s 64, but works 12-hour days, charging $61 for an hourlong flying lesson.

But Gold wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s committed to showing would-be aviators that they, too, can fly west with the night like aerial heroine Beryl Markham, or trace the adventures of fabled French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

“Once that plane leaves the ground,” Gold says, “it’s magic.”

It’s a tough time to earn a living this way. The high cost of fuel, insurance and the planes themselves have squeezed the ranks of potential aviators. There now are about 654,000 certified pilots in the United States, down from about 709,000 in 1985, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

But more than 96,000 people were classified as student pilots last year, according to statistics from the General Aviation Manufacturers Assn. in Washington. Somebody has to teach them.

Teaching flight is often considered an entry-level job in aviation, a pit stop for many who want to log the thousands of flight hours needed to apply for the prestigious jobs with the airlines. For others, it’s a part-time job that puts the instructor in the air while helping defray the cost of plane rental.

Of the 55,000 people in the United States who are qualified as flight instructors, only about 10,000 teach full time. And of those, only about 3,000 plan to remain in teaching their entire career, estimates Jack Eggspuehler of the National Flight Instructors Assn. Inc., a Dublin, Ohio-based professional organization.

Gold is among the few who consider teaching to be the only way to work, the logical extension of their favorite activity. “It’s not the most lucrative job,” he sighs, sitting in his office with a big window overlooking parked planes near the runway. “But it is the most enjoyable.”

For 33 years, Gold ran a successful furniture store in Sherman Oaks. He took up flying as a hobby, learning at the now-closed Santa Susana Airport about 20 years ago. He became hooked and kept going, racking up hours and hours of flight time.

When the flight school he now runs in Burbank came up for sale 13 years ago, he sold his furniture store, bought the school and built it into a business that now boasts $200,000 in annual revenue.

Gold has been lucky, as the pay for most instructors can be limited. Even when an instructor works full time, the most successful earn an average of no more than $45,000 a year, estimated Eggspuehler of the flight instructor association. Younger instructors, struggling to get established, can make poverty-level wages of $9,000, he said.

Other drawbacks include some unpredictability. Though instructors will try to teach students to fly in bad weather, severe weather can keep a plane on the ground, and students will often cancel at the last moment. The hours are grueling.

“Like any profession, it has its hardships,” said Kearnes Branham, 57, co-owner of Berg-Branham Flying Service Inc. in Van Nuys.

Branham, who has been teaching for 28 years, says it’s not all bad, though. “It sure as heck beats sitting in an office. It’s a different life. There’s something new on each day.”

Then there are the abstract rewards of teaching confidence.

“That’s the hardest thing probably to do,” Branham said. Students need to grasp they “can handle this machine and [they] can handle it safely.”

Gold says his biggest challenge in teaching is to remain patient with students as they try to grasp the complexities of flying.

Former student Dr. Foster Gossard says Gold meets that challenge. The Glendale internist, now almost 80, got his private pilot’s certificate when he was 70, and then advised two other family members to take flying lessons from Gold.

“The younger instructors tend to get excited, to get all upset,” Gossard said. “Dave has instructed so long he just sits back, and when he sees you’re in trouble, he says, ‘I got it. Turn it loose, please.’ ”

Gold doesn’t even like to recall his days in unfinished pine now. When asked about it, he quickly changes the subject back to the skies and his students.

The trickiest part of teaching, Gold says, aside from explaining landings, is knowing when a student is ready to fly solo. Gold says he agonizes over the decision, but takes pride in feeling that he has prepared his students well. Though a few students have had accidents in bad weather after getting their certificates, not one has ever died in a crash.

He prepares students for the solo moment, in part, by telling them about his own experience. He remembers the anxiety after leaving the ground, the sweaty palms on entering the traffic pattern, his heartbeat as he touched ground.

“The biggest smile comes across your face and people say they usually let out a big roar,” Gold said. “You could have heard me in the next county.”