Moneyshot. Perhaps this should be posted on the Instructor forum for their opinions?..
Jealously guarded AFI jobs? That is only to be expected. Many of the AFIs around havent been lucky/priveledged/hard working* (delete as necessary) enough to have your helicopter background. They are freelance, trying to build hours for their chosen career - in helicopters - and probably getting the hours in at an abysmally slow rate.
Now imagine that you come along. An airline pilot earning £40/50/60k whatever p.a. And you want to take some of those few precious hours away from them, not because you need them, but because your day-job is boring. Mmmmmmmmm. Going to be about as popular as a f~rt in a spacesuit, aren't you?
Now then, if you wanted a full-time commercial pilot / AFI job, I'm sure you could get one no bother. Depends which is most important to you, job satisfaction or the money, and I think you've answered that yourself!
From an AOC point of view, I get a lot of requests from airline / mil pilots for part-time work. The fact is that, like most small operators, we could use freelance pilots in the summer months as back-up for the full-time boys, but we are not going to waste time and money base + line checking people who are going to have limited availability. Now, if the CAA would allow all commercial pilots to have one base / line check that covered all AOC operators, rather than the current idiotic set-up, we could set up a pool of people like yourself safe in the knowledge that if we needed a freelancer, there wpuld definiteley be one who was on a day off.
But thats another story...