2. I started flying at 15 and got the certificate about a day after I turned 16 to solo, had a neighbor who owned his own Cessna doing little contract mini-cargo runs and went with him every chance I got. We did 50+ hours a month together for over two years and I had 1,343 hours by the time I graduated high school.
Not that I really care about this, but I am bored and curious:
You got your license in the U.S. or somewhere else? If it was in the U.S., the minimum age for a Private Pilot certificate is 17. The minimum age for a Commercial Pilot certificate is 18. Let's say you were somehow 17 when you started flying with your neighbor (though you imply you were 16). Your neighbor had a plane doing "little contract mini-cargo runs," implying that he was being paid to fly, implying the need for a Part 135 certificate, implying that to log any of the time doing the actual 135 flying (if your hands were on the controls OR if you were acting as a SIC) you would have to have a Commercial Pilot certificate and be checked out and approved on your neighbor's certificate.
You flew 50 hours a month with him, you say. Were you both logging the time in a single engine plane during the flights, and if so, how? If, rather, you actually flew with him
100 hours a month and only actually
flew the plane on the empty legs (part 91), and you were only able to log 50 hours a month that way, how did you log it? If you were 16, you weren't old enough to log it as PIC, since you were not old enough to hold a Private Pilot certificate. You also could not log it as solo, since you obviously were not the only one in the plane. And solo is
not the same as PIC anyway. If your neighbor happened to be a flight instructor as well, you could log the time (only the Part 91 time) as dual and not PIC. That would mean that you flew 100 hours a month with your neighbor, since you couldn't log the entire flight time (the paid, Part 135 portion), only the empty legs. When did you have time to go to school or do anything else, since flying 100 hours a month is obviously a full time job?
If you were in fact 17 when you flew with your neighbor (implying that you had your PPL), you still couldn't log any legs which were Part 135, since you weren't 18 yet and thus not able to hold a CPL. So you still would have had to be flying 100 hours a month and only logging the Part 91 legs (50 hours a month),
IF you were the sole manipulator of the controls.
Let's not even talk about the Part 135 minimum pilot experience requirements (IFR or VFR) once you WERE 18, which would also imply that you were checked out and put on your neighbor's Air Taxi certificate, if he had one.
Do you see how questions are raised here?