“It’s Never Too Late” is a series that tells the story of people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.
Live music is gone. Patrick Milando has no other conclusion. But maybe he can pivot.
It’s a summer day in 2020, a peak of the coronavirus pandemic, and Mr. Milando, a French horn player, drives through a locked, empty Times Square. After 67, he spent almost half a century as a professional musician, from the Metropolitan Opera to more than a dozen years with “The lion king.” Now that musical, along with many others, has closed. At an age when his colleagues were finishing their work, Mr. Milando found himself thinking of a new way to pay the bills — 5,000 feet up his old road.
Sometimes we happily jump into a new life. Sometimes we happily jump at a push.
Mr. Milando started flying single-engine planes before the pandemic, but only as a hobby. (He had logged about 300 hours of flight time.) Now, he thought, could he become a professional pilot? He’s too old to fly for the major airlines (the cutoff is 65), but there’s no age limit on teaching others fly away
Mr. Milando found a small flight school in New Jersey and set out to get his commercial pilot’s certificate. The other pilots there were likely to be decades younger, and he never once saw a fellow French hornist. (Most seemed to work on computers, he observed.) But he felt at home; flying opened something in him.
“There is freedom, autonomy. You are the master of your own destiny,” he said.
Now Mr. Milando, 71, has had two careers – it turns out that the death of live music has been greatly exaggerated. He divides his time between the orchestra pit and the friendly skies, where he mentors budding pilots as ever. (The following interview has been edited and condensed.)
How did you become interested in flying?
As a musician, I’ve done a lot of traveling. I was very intrigued by the flying aspect. I got a flight simulator game for fun, when my kids were young. You can hear me in the basement yelling, “Pull, pull!” When I was 60 years old, my husband taught me to fly. From there, I got my private pilot’s license.
What do you like about flying?
Very quiet. One of the most satisfying times is when you are passing through the clouds, and you are relying on your instrument training, then suddenly you are above the clouds and you have a beautiful panorama in front of you.
It is in a hurry. The first time you do it, it’s life changing. Life changing and life-reinforcing.
It seems a tad riskier than honking. Is it scary sometimes?
The scariest thing was landing the first time. I remember I had an opera in West Palm Beach, and I was there with my instructor at 1,500 feet, looking at the tarmac, thinking, Well, I just have to land this plane. Then, I feel like I’m going to cry. It was intense, and amazing.
What made you think about flying professionally?
When the pandemic came, all of us musicians were like, “Oh my God, what are we going to do?” The prevailing feeling is that the music will stop; Broadway is never coming back.
I remember driving through Times Square one day and seeing everyone riding. It was really scary and I thought, OK, let’s just try race No. 2. I am not one to sit and do nothing.
So how did you do it?
I found this little flight school in New Jersey, called Sky Training, and I got my commercial rating. Then I flew to Minnesota that summer to get my certified instructor rating, so I could teach other people to fly. I also got a seaplane rating, just for this. Eventually I flew a seaplane over Lake Como in Italy and waved at — who lives there? George Clooney?
Anyway now I teach people to fly everything from a single-engine Cessna to a multi-engine Piper.
Are there similarities between music and flight?
My success as a musician has always come when I am fully focused on the moment. When you put aside all the extraneous things happening around you. That’s kind of what you have to do when you’re flying an airplane.
As a teacher, I had a student freeze 100 feet from the runway. I had to push his hands off the controls and pick them up. He was in mental freeze, unable to get out of it. You must always be in the moment.
How often do you fly now?
That was the tricky part because I was responsible for eight shows a week on “The Lion King.” Mondays are dark, so I usually fill the day with the students, and just keep current on the flight of the various planes. Then I’ll usually get someone to play for me later that week, and teach more people. So I fly maybe 15 hours a week.
Any advice for people interested in making a change like this, but worried they’re too old to learn something new?
I said go for it, absolutely go for it. There is no reason not to.
Are you done making big changes?
I’m like a shark, I have to keep going. I have run eight marathons; I want to learn languages. Now I’m thinking a bit about an Airline Transport Pilot certificate, the ATP, so I can start flying people down to the Caribbean. This is almost the last step in aviation.
Every time I say I’m done, my kids say, “Yeah, I’ve heard that before.” So I guess I’ll take that ATP
