Originally Posted by
tail wheel
He should never undertake his proposed flying work as a contractor, only as a permanent part time or full time employee.
I agree with you, I didn't like the term "contractor" when I wrote it, however there's little doubt that if an employer is faced with liability in the order of hundreds of thousands he's almost certainly going to argue that case, especially if that's the reason the pilot is hired in the first place.
It's the main reason I'm not comfortable with it, the company will hang the pilot out to dry and distance itself as much as possible, all spotlights will be on the pilot if it goes pear shaped and someone is killed or injured. A little bit harder to do that if the company owns the aircraft.
I'll explain a priority risk action that we do that a freshly minted cpl wouldn't even know about. When we need to go into a new location it's usually a bush strip, before we use it we take our survey team in and measure everything, particularly the airspace, terrain, and build special departure procedure if the terrain requires it, along with a rad alt approach procedure and tested in the event we get caught and must land here because there's no where else within range. We also want someone contactable on the ground there that know what we need from them. We take it seriously there's a lot to check and assure in these types of operations. These are things your not going to get from a company that knows nothing about aviation and relies upon someone else that probably doesn't know either. What could go wrong.