It’s really hard in the Uk to build the hours from where you now, utility operators like ourselves work in quite a specialised area and require a relatively high skill set. Our aircraft insurance is constantly going up and currently our minimum hours are 2000hrs, this is purely to bring the insurance down as much as possible. This doesn’t necessarily reflect the skill of the pilot!
Our operations do not suit new pilots however we can sometimes provide a backbone to get you into other work, we require all our pilots to have ground crew experience before they even fly, to give them a base understanding of what’s going on from the ground up, I know it doesn’t sound very exciting but it does provide you with a greater understanding of how utility works, in the Uk.
Keep networking and don’t be afraid to look further afield in other parts of the world to gain experience, age is certainly on your side and short term visas should be fairly easy to gain?
Cheers SS