Mr Koehn was old school Hog pilot, brought his Phantom experience forward into it. Think he had something like 5 or 6 DFC awards earned.
What you write above is true, regarding the passion, or lack thereof, for aviation. To many these days, it’s just another job, one that they can make a lot of money quickly in…so they have been told. But there’s no flame of passion for it.
Another place this exact thing is being seen, is in the professional fire service. Example: Phoenix, AZ fire department used to, way back in the day, be nearly impossible to get on with unless you were a legacy surname or knew tons of the high ups in the department. Yearly, there would be nearly 3500 applications for maybe 20-30 slots, and these were applicants who had a passion for the job.
Today, Phoenix, along with many other large departments, who historically never had a problem hiring, are advertising hard for applicants. What is being seen, are people applying for the job, getting hired, but who have no real passion for the job. They get into the academy, and maybe a few weeks in or so, decide the job is too much work or too much effort. Not what they thought it would be etc etc. And they’d drop out. So here’s a slot that could’ve been taken by someone who maybe didn’t test as well on the written test, or didn’t score as high on the oral board, or whatever; but who had a complete passion to do the job, whatever it took. And time and effort was wasted on someone who was just looking for a job that maybe looked somewhat interesting….figured they’d try it out and see if they like it.
Similar to aviation, I’m running across a lot of young hires in both fields…..aviation, firefighting, and to some extent LE, who don’t have that pride in their craft. To want to know as much as they can and constantly strive to improve. Lately, I’m seeing more and more people only strive to want to know just enough to get by, that if the minimums weren’t good enough, then they wouldn’t be the minimums, would they?