Those with partners and/or families can be found all over the world, very far from home, flying for a living. This often-nomadic lifestyle does not have to be the sole domain of young free and single types. Along the way you might also get the opportunity to live and work in other countries and see and do things you never imagined. Competition for these alternative roles may well be fierce in the current climate but then if you can’t handle a competitive job market then perhaps consider another career! Also, there is absolutely no substitute for experience or plain simple hours in the air, no matter what the role is, as long as you are determined to derive absolutely every possible ounce of value from each and every hour. I am not dragging all this up just to fit the stereotype that “everything was tougher in my day” but rather to remind us all that there are other ways than the airlines to earn money by flying. This meant building hours and experience with whichever employer/s you could convince to actually take you on in whichever aircraft they would trust you, doing whatever they thought you might be capable of! Conditions could be harsh at times and remuneration was underwhelming (and often sporadic, even non-existent) but at least you were on the right road to your ultimate goal. To achieve the dizzy heights of decent salary, pension, benefits, proper roster and a peaked cap to boot, you were expected to have properly served your apprenticeship. Airlines wouldn’t even consider you unless you had at least 1500 hrs and very healthy twin time. Flying training organisations across the world sprang up to satisfy that demand – simple market forces in action.īut you know what it didn’t used to be like that, at least not in the countries in which I cut my aviation teeth. More recently, the meteoric (pre-covid) increase in global air travel had created a simply staggering requirement for a constant supply of new pilots. You might even have had to step away from it completely for a few years and find something else to “bring home the bacon” only to return phoenix like (!) to a flying job once more when things started to improve. I have been around long enough to have experienced quite a few booms and busts in my aviation career and not that long ago it was just considered normal that from time to time your career took a backward step. Following on from the much publicised BALPA warning not to begin professional pilot training and the general doom and gloom around the aviation industry recently, I thought it would be useful to go over once again the various options for those who are simply unwilling (quite rightly in my opinion) to give up on their dream.
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