I'm surprised no one has yet pointed out to Ben that the likelyhood of a 22 year old newly minted pilot with 250 hours with no experience of rough strips and tropical weather getting a bush pilot job is slim.
Not quite true, there are lots of opperators in Africa who will take a low baby pilot, but the life expectancy will be LOW! And most of them will be north of the Limpopo. In Africa some companies want 'seat warmers' due to insurance req's saying 2 crew on nearly everything, we have had to have co-jo's on king air 200's, 100's, islanders and even a C210 for a while! The other things you have to look out for is B.E.E (affermative action) in RSA, and similar things in the rest of the continent, which is fair i guess. However there are always ways around this. Been bush flying all over Africa for over 8 years, it gets in your blood and you will learn to fly, not that stuff you learn in school, but real flying, hands on, no computers to go wrong! Just monster storms, rebels shooting at you, power cuts the norm, dont drink the water, loads of cool disease's (malaria, ebola, hep a,b,c, dysentry etc) lousy maint, crappy planes ( to start off ) and on and on and on......
BUT I LOVE THE BLO
DY PLACE
People you work with can be some of the best in the world (few crooks excepted), you get paid tax free so GB cant touch your money, night flying is rare so sundowners at the pub when you land, beer is always cold and cheep, you get to see amazing places, and siht holes, some contrcts are 6 on, 6 off and they cover all costs to and from home, where ever that may be. True the language can be a problem, but mainly you only need english or french for 80% of the place, its not that hard to learn.
With the license conversion it depends on where you go. When i first came here i had a FAA cpl me/ir. Now i have a kenyan cpl (expired), tanzanian cpl (expired) RSA atpl, FAA atpl, JAA atpl and a congo atpl (was hard that one!
) all current, (got a few more, but using them as door stops, wobbly table etc). Have flown piston singles into 500m dirt strips in the jungle, twins into int airports, had holes put in planes by the popular russian export, carried all sort of cargo, live, dead, SLF, things that go bang, gold, gems, crates of money.... Now flying DC8 and king airs, jolly good fun 50 ft off the beach!
If you think you can come and hack all the bull siht that various CAA's will give you, and then do the rounds knocking on doors, come on down and have the best flying you will ever do. I have met guys who were in the airlines and chucked it to go back to real flying, because they were bored
flying 8 hours ILS to ILS!!
in a presurised cigar tube.
Hope this has helped in anyway, any other questions DO NOT pm me, put them in the thread so others can see.
Got to go, beach and beer time.
Cheers
Brat
