A Jobless 67-Year-Old Hornblower With A Lofty Solution

It was a wish I kept to myself. After all, the job, kids, business travel,  yard work, bill paying, etc. consumed all my waking time. Maybe someday. . . .

Well, now an empty nester, my workload light, I finally can indulge my secret desire: learning to play the piano. Alas, it turns out that learning to fly was much faster in reward. The repetition, isolation and finger-stumbling up and down the keyboard are so stultifying, I am nearly resigned that my time for mastering the piano is past.

But then Patrick Milando comes to mind.

When he was a youngster, Milando’s family moved a lot in connection with his stepdad’s career as a jazz trumpeter. Once he was a high school junior, Milando allowed that he wanted to play the trumpet as well. However, the music teacher noted there were already 15 trumpeters in the band and encouraged him to take up the French horn, since there was only one student who could play it. And so he did.

With graduation nearing, Milando showed an affinity for two subjects: music and chemistry. He was unsure which to pursue as a career until the music teacher as a senior tribute asked him to play the first movement of Mozart’s “Horn Concerto No. 3.” The experience so moved him that he knew then his life’s work would be musical, not chemical.

However, since he had begun playing at such a relatively late age, Milando felt unprepared for a professional musical track. So he earned a teaching degree and taught music to high schoolers for four years before finally committing to a master’s program at the Manhattan School of Music. Although he was by then in his mid-20s, he was going for it all.

How did it work out? He became a member of Chile’s Orquesta Filarmonica de Santiago, then Italy’s Orchestra del Teatro di San Carlo. He has played with New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, helping win Grammy Awards for both, and he has performed in numerous other cities and countries. In 2007, Milando took a seat in the Minskoff Theater’s orchestra pit as first French horn player for Broadway’s “The Lion King,” and there he has remained. Although he was a late starter, he realized his dream.

Milando had another dream: to fly. But there were numerous practical barriers to defying gravity (reference opening paragraph). Then much to his delight, for his 60th birthday, Milando’s wife gave him flying lessons.

Soon, he was airborne over New Jersey, an experience he describes as “life-changing and life-affirming.” He was awarded his private pilot's license in 2018 and went on to earn instrument and seaplane ratings as well. Within the next two years he had accumulated some 300 flight hours and savored being “a master of your own destiny.”

That was until March 2020, which is when the Minskoff went dark due to COVID-19, putting Milando and everyone else associated with “The Lion King” out of work. Their consensus: Live theater was dead, never to return.

Unemployed, 67 years old and restless, Milando decided to abandon the music scene for the heavens by becoming a professional flight instructor. He well recognized a new set of barriers: earning his commercial pilot certificate along with certified flight instructor (CFI )and instrument ratings. But, hey, now he had time available to do just that—and he did not waste any of it.

Six months and $20,000 later, Milando was earning his keep as a CFI. He had realized his second dream by becoming a professional pilot. Since then, he has added multi-engine and multi-instructor ratings as well. In addition to being a CFI with the Jersey Aero Club, he is chief flight instructor with the Monmouth Area Flying Club and typically goes aloft with students two days a week.

He would go up more often if available, but the lights came back on. The Minskoff’s curtain rose again in September 2021, and the first French horn was back to making music five days a week.

Asked if there are any other dreams to be realized, Milando says that “it would be fun” to fly seaplane charters to the Caribbean. Oh, and he is “thinking about” earning an air transport pilot ticket, since that is “the last thing you can get” as an aviator.

At 71? “Age is just a relative number,” he says. “What matters is how you feel.”

After that interview, I feel like I had better get back to practicing scales.

William Garvey was editor-in-chief of Business & Commercial Aviation from 2000 to 2020.