Hello my fellow rotorheads, I need advice regarding FAA licenses.
I am military pilot (1900h total, 180h IFR, 250night, mostly Mi-8/17, SAR, CSAR, external cargo, firefighting, mountain, instructor/examiner, maintenance test pilot), thinking about civil carrier.
Due to crazy situation in my country (actually crazy CAA) I can't get any licenses. We accepted JAR and will switch to EASA, but that blocked all helicopter operations...we are too small to have FTO and we don't even have any commercial helicopter operator.
Our CAA thinks that only reason of their existence is Croatia Airlines.
(in their brilliance they signed every single paper EASA put in front of them, and now due to fine print Croatian airplane licenses are actually national license becuse we are not full member of EU
)
I managed to get my military hours in civil logbook and got ICAO CPL(H) with type rating for Schweizer300, which expired but I can renew it and convert it to JAR. I also have ICAO ATPL(A)+IR theory, and did conversion course for JAR ATPL.
I guess it is possible to convert JAR CPL(H) to FAA...
What is bothering me is IR, from what I reed in FAR it seems that my military IFR hours might count for 40h of IFR for license and that i need maybe only 15h of training?
(I tried that for JAR IFR ME, but ended up that I have to do all 55h (we don't have any FTO so I would need to do it abroad, so nothing cam be transferred from military), which cost that much that there is no economical sense to leave military and go to civil flying)
From what I have seen that is currently only option for me. I don't have money to get JAR IR...
Thanks for all inputs.
Fly safe