It’s Never Too Late to Find a New Career (A Mile Above Your Old One)

“It’s Never Too Late” is a series that tells the stories of people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.

Live music no longer existed. Patrick Milando could draw no other conclusion. But maybe he could turn.

It was a summer day in 2020, a height of the coronavirus pandemic, and Mr. Milando, a French horn player, was driving through a shuttered, cleared Times Square. At 67, he had spent nearly half a century as a professional musician, from the Metropolitan Opera to more than a dozen years at “The lionking.” Now that musical, along with so many others, was closed. At an age when his colleagues were wrapping up their jobs, Mr. Milando was thinking about a new way to pay the bills – 5,000 feet above his old way.

Sometimes we jump happily into a whole new life. Sometimes we jump up happily with a push.

Mr. Milando had started flying single-engine planes before the pandemic, but purely as a hobby. (He had logged about 300 hours of flying time.) Now he wondered: Could he actually become a professional pilot? He was too old to fly for the major airlines (the limit is 65), but there was no age limit for teaching others to fly.

Mr. Milando found a small flight school in New Jersey and set out to earn his commercial pilot certificate. The other pilots there were generally decades younger, and not once did he see a fellow French horn player. (Most seemed to work on computers, he noted.) But he felt at home; flying stirred something in him.

“There is a freedom, an autonomy. You are the master of your own destiny,” he said.

Today, 71-year-old Milando has two careers; the death of live music appears to be greatly exaggerated. He divides his time between the orchestra pit and the friendly skies, teaching aspiring pilots as he once was. (The following interview has been edited and condensed.)

How did you become interested in flying?

As a musician I have traveled a lot. I was very intrigued by the flying aspect. When my kids were young, I got a flight simulator game for fun. You heard me in the basement screaming, “Pull up, pull up!” When I turned 60, my wife gave me flying lessons. From there I got my private pilot’s license.

What do you like about flying?

It’s very serene. One of the best moments is when you go through the clouds and you rely on your instrument training, and then suddenly you are above the clouds and you have this beautiful panorama in front of you.

It’s a hurry. The first time you do it, it’s life-changing. Life-changing and life-affirmative.

It seems a little riskier than playing the horn. Was it ever scary?

The scariest part was landing for the first time. I remember I had an opera in West Palm Beach, and I’m there with my instructor at 1,500 feet, looking at the tarmac and thinking, Well, I just have to land this plane. Then I felt like I was going to cry. It was just so intense and amazing.

What made you think about flying professionally?

When the pandemic happened, all of us as musicians were like, “Oh my God, what are we going to do?” The overriding feeling was that the music would stop; Broadway would never come back.

I remember driving through Times Square one day and seeing everything was boarded up. It was really scary and I thought, OK, let’s try career No. 2. I’m not someone who sits around and does nothing.

So how did you make it happen?

I found a small flight school in New Jersey called Sky Training and got my commercial rating. Then later that summer I flew to Minnesota to get my certified instructor license so I could teach other people to fly. I also got a seaplane rating, just for fun. I ended up flying a seaplane over Lake Como in Italy and waved to: 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 flying?

My success as a musician always comes when I am completely focused on the moment. When you put aside all the strange things around you. That’s pretty much what you have to do when you fly 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 take them over. He was in a mental freeze and couldn’t get out of it. You always have to be in the moment.

How often do you fly now?

That’s the tricky part, because I’m responsible for eight shows a week on “The Lion King.” Mondays are dark, so I usually spend the day with students and staying on top of flying different planes. Then I usually hire someone to play for me another day that week and teach more people. So I end up flying maybe 15 hours a week.

Any advice for people who are interested in such a change but worry they are too old to learn something new?

I say: go for it, absolutely go for it. There’s no reason not to do that.

Are you done making big changes?

I’m like a shark, I have to keep moving. I have run eight marathons; I love learning languages. Now I’m kind of wondering about an Airline Transport Pilot certificate, the ATP, so I could fly people to the Caribbean. It is virtually the last step in aviation.

Every time I say I’m done, my kids say, “Yeah, I’ve heard that before.” So I think I’ll get that ATP