If you are aiming for a career aloft piloting an aircraft, this image could be jarring: At reliable.co, a wing-mounted camera peers into the cockpit of a venerable Cessna 172 in flight. What’s missing? The pilot!
For well more than a year, the airline career skies have been gloomy. Naysayers were predicting a continuing slowdown in air travel resulting in a virtual shutdown of hiring ad infinitum.
It is true what is said about social media: It can be a blessing or a curse. Lots of good information and support comes to the user, but trolls and naysayers are rampant as well.
We get it. This COVID thing has inflicted moderate to severe turbulence upon the professional aviation career aspirations of so many future airline and corporate pilots.
Airplane pilots may shudder at the thought of guiding a winged machine through the atmosphere while perched in a land-based office, van, tent, or foxhole.
It bit hard and deep, that flying bug. Somehow you succumbed to that wonderful illness of aviating and earned those coveted FAA ratings years ago, maybe in your 20s.
It is such a long haul from the commercial pilot certificate to the airline transport pilot certificate. Once hitting the 250-hour mark required for the commercial certificate, it seems it will take forever and a day to tally 1,500 hours (see “1,500 or Bust?” p. 50, for exceptions) to qualify for the ATP, which is required to fly an airliner even as a first officer. How to bridge that wide gap?
It can be frustrating for many aspiring professional pilots: earning a four-year degree as a requisite for bigger, better jobs and pay in the airlines.
