Pilots, mechanics, controllers, and employers, talking about the work. Anyone can read. You need an account to post, comment, or react.
A PIREP takes you eleven seconds and it is the only weather report in the system made by a human who was actually there. Everything else is a model or a machine on the ground. If you pick up ice, or…
Cargo hiring is open at basically every freight carrier right now and the applications are not coming. Same pay band as the passenger side, better schedules than people assume, and a fleet that is…
Hiring CFIs again. What I look for is not your hours or your checkride record. It is whether you can explain the same idea three different ways without getting frustrated the second time. That is…
unpopular avionics opinion. the intermittent fault is not intermittent. it is a fault with a condition you have not identified yet. temperature, vibration, moisture, load. find the condition and it…
If you want into aviation management, the route nobody advertises is operations. Start on the airfield. Learn the movement area, the NOTAM system, the grant paperwork, and one winter of snow…
Somebody asked how corporate cabin work differs from the airlines. Airline: 174 passengers, a crew of four, a manual for everything. Corporate: fourteen passengers at most, me alone, and a manual…
building hours is a job, not a hobby, and the sooner you treat it like one the faster it goes. banner tow, pipeline, skydive ops, traffic watch, ferry. all of it is PIC time and all of it teaches…
Restricted ATP question, since three people asked after my last post. Military time gets you the R-ATP at 750 hours instead of 1,500. It is the single biggest advantage of separating with flight…
Twenty-two years with the A and P and here is the thing I would tell someone starting. This trade pays you for judgment, not for turning wrenches. Anybody can follow a manual. You get paid for the…
Third month in the left seat. Something nobody tells new captains: your first officer is watching how you handle the small annoyances, not the emergencies. Late catering, a gate change, a slow…
four months on the line now and im 14 hours from my private checkride. working the ramp taught me more about wind than any lesson did. you feel it all day. you watch what it does to a King Air on…
Flight attendant training is six weeks and about 40 percent of my class did not finish. It is not a hospitality course. It is evacuations, fire, decompression, and medical, tested to a standard,…
If you are looking at the aircraft dispatcher certificate, the honest pitch is this. Five to seven weeks of school, no medical, no flight time, and you will know more about how an airline actually…
passed the airframe written. one to go. for anyone deciding between a part 147 school and apprenticing under an IA like i did: school is faster and costs money, apprenticing is slower and pays you.…
Stripped and repainted a Citation over five weeks. People see the shiny airplane at the end. They do not see the two weeks of sanding, the humidity readings four times a day, or the fact that one…
I underwrite aircraft policies. The single biggest thing that moves a premium is not hours, it is recency and training in type. I have written good rates on a 400 hour pilot with recurrent training…
Simulator technician, eleven years. When the box goes down at 0500 there are six crews behind it and a training footprint that does not move. Last week it was a motion actuator, the week before a…
Twelve years at flight service. I take the briefing calls nobody thinks exist anymore. The pilots who use us are almost all over fifty, and the twenty-somethings all read an app instead. The app is…
Behind the FBO desk we know things nobody tells the crews. Which hotel actually holds a late room. Which handler answers after 10pm. Which catering order will be wrong. FBO jobs get treated as a…
Drilled out 84 rivets today to replace a doubler the size of a paperback. Structures work is slow on purpose. Every one of those holes has a spec and an edge distance and somebody signs their name…
Flight nurse, five years. The part people get wrong is thinking the flying is the hard bit. The flying is Hank being quietly excellent while I run a critical patient in a space the size of a bathtub…
Question I got asked twice this week, so answering it here. Yes, low time pilot jobs exist, and no, most of them are not flying. Right seat SIC time in a 135 operation is real and it is the fastest…
Loaded 41,000 pounds tonight in the rain and the whole thing balanced to within 200 pounds of the plan. Ramp work is the most physical job on the airfield and the most mathematical, and I have never…
Six years on the ARFF crew and I have rolled on maybe nine real events. The rest is drills, foam tests, and driving a 60,000 pound truck around a field at 3am. People hear firefighter and picture…
AOG at 4pm on a Friday, which is the only time anything goes AOG. Actuator, one in Memphis, one in a shop in Ontario that closes in forty minutes. Got the Memphis one on a counter-to-counter and the…
Passed. The examiner gave me a hold I had never seen and a partial panel ILS to minimums, and my hands were steady the whole way down. To everyone who told me 41 was not too late, thank you.…
Eleven years of this and people still ask when im going to get a real job. Today I talked a nervous flyer through her first flight since 2019, ran a medical with a doctor onboard, and kept 174…
Fourteen months on reserve, two years in the right seat, and today I flew my first trip as captain. Same airplane, same routes, completely different job. Nobody warns you how quiet it gets when the…
Soloed a student this morning. He is 19, works nights at a warehouse, and pays for every hour in cash. Three trips around the pattern and he taxied back grinning like he had won something. Days like…
Flew four legs today and slept in my own bed. That is the whole pitch for corporate. The tradeoff is that my phone never goes on silent, and I have not planned a birthday more than a week out in six…