Sky_Bound

How'd you pay for private?
How'd you get (pay) for CFI ?


Otter,
If one pays for a flight school the FAA automatically passes them ?

avbug

Well I went to a 4 year university that offered a flight program. Majored in something else and minored in professional flight. I used scholarships, student loans and ******* credit cards to pay and earn all my ratings.

otter

"If one pays for a flight school, the FAA automatically passes them". Yep, almost. Why do you think so many student pilots pick a pilot examiner instead of the FSDO? The FSDO is free for check rides! The answer is flight schools are business. Most part 141 flight schools have their own pilot examiners for that given school. Think about it, if you ran that flight school and all of your students were busting their rides, you would go out of business in a short amount of time. I'm not saying that any pilot who went to a 141 school is a bad pilot and paid for his or her rating, however, I've seen people pass rides at flight schools that really should not have.

Pilotpip

I don't know what FSDO's jurisdiction you have been in, but STL doesn't allow DEs to administer exams to students at their school. I would imagine that Chicago will be following suit after the little issue they had with a certain well-known flight school there. Oh, and I got pink slipped on one of those rides with a DE, so they do fail you.

Why have I paid to take exams with a DE? Because the cost was less considering that I would have had to wait at least a month to take a check ride with someone from the FSDO. Scheduling the flight when I want saves quite a bit of money instead of renting a plane to keep fresh and ready.

ToiletDuck

A lot of the CFI hours in a year depends on the CFI himself and the location. In Texas here some of these guys get only like 25hrs a month while my old CFI who now works for North West. He flew about 1000hrs a year.

Brav989

Since from what i've read, all major carriers require at least 1000 hours PIC, are you basically required to have worked for a regional for a period of time, or have been in the military as a pilot?

ToiletDuck

Most people tell you to go the flight instructor route. I can't tell you anything more than that or I would be stepping outside my boundries. However I do know that if you go to a school like Gulfstream you only get SIC time and Pinnacle use to hire from them good but after a few problems with their pilots (high fail rates and such) rumor has it they don't like them so much. They now put a PIC requirement so most those guys can't/won't get hired. This is older information from beginning of the year so it may have changed. I know a guy that's a captain there as well and he said they are hiring like crazy.

Kill Bill

whaaaaat? you mean PFT means a high failure rate on checkrides??? how can this be? i thought you PFT guys were god's gift!

ToiletDuck

I hope that didn't mean me. I can't afford to be a PFT guy. I'm having to go old school. Farming industry isn't what it use to be so the fam is having to watch the spending.

Kill Bill

no, not you (cool avatar, BTW... i'm a huge hitchcock fan...)

it just irks me that these guys come out of PFT with a couple of hundred hours thinking they actually know what they're doing.

i came up the "hard way": working full-time, going to school full-time, flying as a CFI on my days off, finally geting enough students to quit my full-time job, flying as a CFI for several years, selling airplanes, flying charters, flying the canyon, my first commuter job, etc. it took me 8 years (1979-1987) and about 3000 hours to go from my first student to the back seat of a 727. this was fairly common among my peers and it gave us all the chance to be exposed to aviation, to scare the **** out of ourselves from time to time, and to generally LEARN about this foreign environment we so desired to be in.

PFT is such a bad idea in so many ways... it's scary. but we live in the "instant gratification" age. "i want it and i want it NOW! or else i'll throw a tantrum." god help us.