Av8trix’s experience is certainly realistic and probably close to what you can expect from flying in the USA at present, but let me put another spin on it. My experience has been quite different from Avi8trix’s, however I don’t fly in the US, and I have had some luck (and some more luck, and then a little bit more.)
I’ll start at the end. I’m a turbo prop (Dash 8) captain in Australia and I guess I’m in the middle of my career at age 35. I get paid a salary rather than per flying hour though if I fly more than a certain number of hours per month I get paid overtime. My base salary is about $110,000 AUD ($98,000 USD) and a new First Officer in this company would get about $70,000 AUD ($62,000 USD.) I get a retention bonus that increases my pay significantly but if I ignore that you can put me down for about $130,000 AUD gross per year (including normal allowances and a small performance bonus.) I work away from home for two weeks and then I have two weeks of days off at home. I like this but my wife doesn’t much. Other pilots who live at a base get a bit more money than I do and they are home more often.
Why do we get a retention bonus? Because there really is a pilot shortage, or there was, and I think there will be again. Our company lost 60% of its pilots in one year to the airlines. That kind of exodus probably won’t happen again but we’re certainly seeing the signs of significant recruiting from the mid level airlines in this part of the world.
So how did I end up here?
I’d wanted to be a pilot for as long as I can remember, maybe since I was 5 years old or earlier. I like to say that I’ve wanted it since I was a fetus, and if my Mum wanted an abortion she’d have had to shoot me down (ok that’s stretching the metaphor a bit.)
I’m from New Zealand and while I was growing up I dreamed of flying old World War II aircraft such as Spitfires and P51 Mustangs. Thinking that that kind of flying was no longer available I thought I’d like to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force and be a fighter pilot flying A4K Skyhawks, that looked like fun!
Unfortunately I spent more time dreaming about flying than I did doing the school work that would give me the grades that the Air Force required. In fact I wagged (skipped) school just to go out and watch a display by Kiwi Red, the RNZAF display team at the time. Anyway, I realised at age 17 that I’d fucked up and probably wasn’t going to be able to fly jets in the Air Force. But that didn’t really matter, I was happy to fly anything really, and after having a nothing year following high school I took up lessons to get a private license. I had some years earlier found out that there were still Spitfires and P51s flying, so maybe the original dream was still possible.
I was 18 when I started. I was unemployed, living at home, receiving an unemployment benefit, and desperately wanted to fly aeroplanes. On the 5th of March 1993 I went for a trial flight in a Cessna C152. The charge was $105 NZD per hour and we flew for half an hour. Back then there were no landing fees, airways charges or even instructor fees at that particular school.
My unemployment benefit was $110 per week and my Mum charged me $40 a week for living with her, that left $70 for flying. Enough for 0.7 hours per week and that is what I did. Every week I’d have one lesson lasting 0.7 hours and I’d spend the rest of the week daydreaming about flying. I didn’t have money for girls, drugs, or alcohol, so I did without.
While training for my private license (PPL) I also learned how to fly a tail-dragger in a Piper Cub and got an introduction to aerobatics. I loved all of it. The PPL required 50 hours of training in NZ and I had my flight test with 58 hours flying time on the 24th of August 1994. So it took me about a year and a half of plodding along doing a little bit each week.
By that time I’d finally got a job at a service (gas) station and with a job I had the ability to pay back a loan. I know that you’ve been advised against borrowing money to fund your flying, but I didn’t have a choice, if I wanted a commercial license (CPL) it was going to cost money that I didn’t have, and my service station job wasn’t enough to directly fund it, I had to borrow.
I borrowed about $25,000 NZD and set about gaining the rest of the 200 hours I needed for a CPL. I hired the Piper Cub I mentioned earlier and took it up and down New Zealand several times, flying 50 hours in two weeks. On that trip I’d drop into little airfields and get chatting to people. When you’re a 20 year old boy flying around the country in a little Cub, people are always up for a chat. I vividly remember talking to a beautiful woman with an alluring foreign accent and, unfortunately, a wedding ring. I wasn’t above trying to impress a married woman though so I took her flying anyway. I don’t know if she’d remember me, but her name is in my logbook. I stopped in to little airfields that were having modest flying displays and just soaked it all up.
By the time I’d finished that trip, I had over 100 hours and for the next 60 hours or so I took friends flying on short local scenic flights around my home town. I also did some more aerobatics. I liked the aerobatics. I took a girl from work flying and she held onto my leg while we did aerobatics, that was fun, I was particularly impressed that she didn’t feel sick, I think she was impressed that she survived.
The final 35 hours or so leading up to the required 200 hours needed for a CPL was spent doing more specific training learning the flight manoeuvres I’d need to demonstrate in the flight test. I’d also done some navigation exercises with an instructor, the last one being a check flight separate from the CPL flight test.
On the 28th of March 1995 I arrived at the airport dressed in smart clothes, nice pants, a shirt and tie, I wanted to show the examiner that not only could I fly, but I was a professional. I flew my CPL flight test in a Cessna C152. We did power on stalls, power off stalls, a forced landing, steep turns, a spiral decent, low flying, a practice engine failure after take-off, some instrument flying, and a number of circuits. The check pilot had “nothing to say” in the debrief except that I needed to have a better look out during the spiral decent. I was on top of the world, I’d passed, and passed well!
I’m sorry this is getting so long, I’m enjoying taking a trip through my memories. I’ll try to ease off on the details from now on.
So I’ve got a CPL, but I don’t have a flying job. What to do? Well it just happens that a couple of young guys were starting up a company taking tourists flying in a Pitts Special and giving them a little taste of aerobatics. They needed a pilot. I only had 200 hours, but I had some tail-dragger experience and I had some aerobatic experience, and they were friends of my flying instructor. Like I said at the start, I’ve had some luck.
On the 6th of April 1995, about one week after sitting my CPL flight test I was strapping myself into a Pitts Special, getting ready for my first training flight. A few days later and I was taking my first passenger. So this was my first job, flying tourists upside down amongst the mountains of New Zealand’s South Island. Absolutely magic!
I think I spent about 8 months there, it wasn’t all roses for me, I was young, immature and living away from home for the first time, I was shy and socially out of my depth. I could fly the aeroplane ok, but I probably wasn’t a great fit for the job. My bosses wanted someone who could take care of the marketing while they were away (they were both pilots working for charter companies.) Around Christmas that year I found my hours being dropped in favour of another pilot who I’m happy to admit was better suited to being an all-round pilot/marketing manager. So that was my first disappointment with flying, and given that the hours they wanted me to do weren’t enough to live off in that town, I found myself looking for other work.
Luckily (there’s that word again) I heard that a pilot working at another similar company in a near by town had just been fired after crashing an aircraft while landing which resulted in a broken nose for his passenger and a broken nose for the aeroplane. I contacted the boss of that company, explained my situation and he agreed to give me a go. I managed to swap jobs without spending a day unemployed.
Working at this new company suited me a lot more. I was able to concentrate on flying, as the boss was hands on with the marketing. I was also able to fly some different aircraft including a number of Tiger Moths, another Pitts Special, a T6 Texan, a Maule, a variety of Cessnas and a few home built aircraft as well. Oh yeah, and this new airfield was home to a collection of warbirds including a Spitfire and a P51 Mustang. I dearly wanted to fly one of those, but that privilege was given mainly to experienced airline pilots with military backgrounds. I was at the wrong end of my career to be seriously considered.
I flew there for about 4 years I think. By that time I was in a bit of a rut. I realised that in many ways I’d achieved my goal. I maybe wasn’t quite flying the aircraft I wanted to but I’d got as close as I could at that age and was doing the kind of flying I’d always dreamed of, real flying, aerobatics, low flying, some air displays. I found it difficult to motivate myself to move on, but I knew I had to, I didn’t want to be a Pitts Special pilot earning $35,000 NZD for the rest of my life.
So I was looking for work again and as luck would have it, I heard about a guy who had a Cessna C185 that he used to cart coffee around the highlands of Papua New Guinea. He was looking for a pilot, and pilots with a lot of tail-dragger time are relatively rare. It took a while, I had to have an HIV test, chest x-rays, immunisations, and meet various requirements to get a working visa for PNG. I had to fly to PNG and sit an Air Law exam and a medical in order to get my NZ license recognised. I was in a serious relationship by then and we’d based ourselves in Australia while I was getting this PNG stuff organised.
Unfortunately for me, after I got my work visa and a PNG license, the bottom fell out of the coffee market and my new boss decided it wasn’t worth carrying coffee that year. He offered me work flying charters but the money wasn’t going to be as good and it would’ve meant living in PNG full time, I wasn’t ready for that.
This was my second low point in my career. Australia was a foreign country to me, I didn’t know anyone in the aviation industry here, I didn’t have an instrument so I would have to find charter work flying VFR and all of that kind of work was up in the northern communities. I was settled with my wife to be and we were less prepared to make sacrifices.
I never would’ve expected it but my salvation came in the form of a job that didn’t have me flying an aeroplane. I suppose you could say I was lucky in that my mother in law knew a woman whose husband worked for a company that had a government contract to provide aircraft and crew to Australian Customs. So I stopped being a pilot and became a radar operator on a surveillance aircraft monitoring the ocean around Australia. As it happens I’m still working for the same company, except I since got an instrument rating, started flying light piston engined twins for them, then got trained as a Dash 8 First Officer and finally moved to the left seat where I enjoy a good lifestyle, fun flying (this isn’t airline stuff, we fly our Dash 8s at 200’), reasonable pay, and very importantly for my family, it is secure.
So what can you take away from that?
There are flying jobs outside the standard instructing, charter, regional, major airline route. I have never flown passengers from A to B and I still don’t have an instructor rating. There are pilots who fly float-planes with pearl divers out to the pearl farms. There are pilots who tow gliders, pilots who fly search and rescue aircraft, pilots flying doctors to remote communities. You can fly coffee around the mountains of PNG, take people on scenic flights in biplanes, or fly hunters into the bush.
I was an ordinary kid before learning to fly. I didn’t know anyone in the industry, I didn’t have anything different from anyone else starting out, and yet things fell into place. Yes I was lucky, but I made the most of the opportunities that came my way. Luck can only get you so far, you have to be ready to step up and accept the challenge.
When I was poor, I steadily and methodically worked toward my goal. I found a flying school with instructors that understood my financial limitations and worked very hard to ensure I got quality training within my budget.
I didn’t realise I was doing it at the time, but I networked. I met the guys who gave me my first job when I was learning to fly. I met the guy who gave me my second job while I was working at the first job. My old flying instructor put me on to the PNG guy. And my mother in law, of all people, put me on to my current employer.
Most of all I love flying and I was always focussed on it. When I was getting serious with the woman who is now my wife, I said “you have to realise that I’m a pilot, I might end of with jobs that have me away from home a lot, if you want to be with me, then you have to accept that this is part of who I am.”
And now here I am, as I write this I’ve just come back from a 7 hour night flight over the ocean with four other guys who are good fun to be with. I’m at the end of my two week stint away from home and will shortly be a passenger on a jet flying back to see my wife and our two young daughters, and I’m looking forward to spending the next two weeks with them.
So that is what becoming a pilot has been like for me. Of course I haven’t actually flown a Spitfire yet, but I’m only 35 and it’s good to have a goal.
You may find that flying is not for you, or you may find that things don’t go your way, but if you want to do it, the only way it’s going to happen is to start flying and put yourself in a position where you can take advantage of the opportunities as they arise.
By the way, I don’t have a degree in anything.
