PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Becoming a professional pilot, and finding a job
Old 1st Feb 2004, 01:51
  #503 (permalink)  
Whirlybird

The Original Whirly
 
Join Date: Feb 1999
Location: Belper, Derbyshire, UK
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You used to be able to get in with the North Sea companies with less than 200 hours and a CPL. That stopped around the end of 2001. Whether they will start recruiting low hours CPLs again is anyone's guess. Part time work doing pleasure flights? Everyone thinks and hopes they'll get that; very few actually do. Most people are now somehow getting to 300 rotary hours and doing an instructors rating. That means that some would say there's now a surplus of newly qualified restricted instructors, while others say very few can afford to do this so there'll soon be a shortage. As one of the newly qualified FI(R)s, I'd say there's work at the moment if you're prepared to push for it a bit and do part time, as Whirlygig said.

Basically, prospects are not good. Now that could change, but it might not. If you want to do it, go in with your eyes open, be prepared to do anything and relocate if necessary, and/or have something else to fall back on. Don't become one of the CPLs who end up broke and disillusioned, wishing they'd never heard of helicopters, and believe me, I've met a few...excited and ambitious in the beginning, older and wiser, and broke and embittered, a few years later.

Sorry to be so negative. I love helicopter flying, and I'll never regret having done all I've done. But I'd be a lot richer if I hadn't. Like I said, do go into it with your eyes open.
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