BRUCE DICKINSON: "Aviation's Been Kicking Around My Family For As Long As I Can Remember..."
October 27, 2007, 17 years ago
CNN.com has issued the following report from Peter Sorel-Cameron:
What do you do after fronting one of the world's biggest metal bands? Settle down and live a quiet life? Continue claiming that you are the cutting edge of music, even though you've only been releasing greatest hits records for the last ten years? Not if you're BRUCE DICKINSON.
By day, the heavy rock legend Bruce Dickinson takes to the skies as a mild-mannered commercial airline pilot.
He was the powerful presence at the front of IRON MAIDEN when they made some of their biggest and best recordings, and for more than a decade he was considered one of heavy metal's spokesmen.
Today, however, although he still tours with the band, his main passion is for the skies. By night he is the screaming, posturing frontman of a band that packs stadiums and festivals; but by day he is the mild-mannered pilot of a 757 passenger plane.
"Aviation's been kicking around my family for as long as I can remember; my uncle was in the RAF," says Dickinson. "But I always thought I was too stupid. I was useless at maths and majored in history at university, so I thought history majors don't become pilots, let alone rock stars. And then our drummer learned to fly so I said if a drummer can learn to fly then anyone can."Dickinson left Iron Maiden in 1993 when they were still considered the mainstays of the heavy metal scene, to pursue a solo career and to broaden his already wide horizons -- five years earlier he highlighted a passion for the sport of fencing when he founded sports equipment company Duellist.
It was also during this period that he began training to become a pilot. "I turned up to a flight school in Florida, jumped in and did a trial lesson, and that was it. 15,000 feet over Florida, I was just severely bitten," he says.
Years later he hasn't been able to shake the addiction, in fact he has taken it one step further, and made it his job.
Read the full story at CNN.com.