When I REALLY started out (in 2006) I got an internship with a defense contractor and kind of worked my way up from there. The project I was on had a lot of ex-military people with no programming skills testing our software because that's who our end-user was.

Don't discount a 15 year career as a pilot - you might be able to get a job testing simulators for Lockheed, Boeing, or one of the others, and if you still want to write code you'll have your foot in the door already.