AVIATORUSMC

Gentlemen,

I want to give a sincere thank you for the advice. You have all given me a lot to think about. Ive decided against flying C-12 or UC-35 in the military based on advice here and elsewhere. With that said, Id appreciate any thoughts on the following:

Over the course of the last week I spoke to a few AF Reserve units in my home town to fly C-5's, KC-135's, etc. One of the units seemed pretty interested and wants to meet in a few weeks while I'm home on leave. It sounds like if they pick me up the timeline would work well for no service gap from active to reserves. Training thereafter would be close to a year on active duty orders for the training pipeline (a positive or negative based on time to the Majors?).

While moving to my home town would be great, the issue is that after the active duty training, and I go to a strictly reserves schedule, the only way I could afford to live in the area would be a contract ISR job. Regional pay would be untenable based on cost of living. Is the juice worth the squeeze with the ultimate goal to be a Majors airline pilot? It sounds like the regionals provide more annual flight hours than contract ISR, also from many peoples comments it seems the regionals offers the fastest way to the majors for helo trash like myself.

With C-17 or other military heavy lift time and a primary job of contract ISR, is the resume is better or worse than just going straight to the regionals now with only helo time? Any thoughts?

Again thanks for the responses!

BeatNavy

If you have mil heavy time and ISR time you should be competitive, just don't know how much of each would make it so. Just make sure whatever route you take you can get 250 airplane PIC hours ASAP so you can at least get an ATP/rATP...dunno if ISR offers that. That said, regional pay isn't that bad now if you still get all the bonuses that are offered. You should expect $60-75k first year. If you did that plus Maj guard/res pay, it wouldn't be that hard to stay close to what you are making now if you used a lot of mil leave and still squeezed in a couple airline trips a month. With seasoning time and TDYs I would bet you can pick up a decent amount of pay and hours your first year back from from the schoolhouse. Are there many bums in that unit? What is the availability of extra full time orders/TDYs? I've heard a lot of units have a ton with everyone at the airlines, but ymmv.

Otterbox

Unfortunately you'd be probably be in a catch 22 situation... depending on how long seasoning was for the guard gig you may not have enough fixed wing time for an ISR gig. Checkout L3 Pilot 2 and Pilot 3, Dynamic Aviation PIC and MAG DS PIC hiring requirements to see how far you'd be off... if your seasoning is only 6 months long like many big winged guard units and you're going into it with only 250hrs of fixed wing time there might be a gap where you need to weasel your way into AD orders for a while longer or find something else before one of the ISR contractors would hire you.

Starting out at 250fw hours you're going to have a while of ISR/guard life before you get attention from any of the majors. Any sort of military fixed wing time from a guard unit will help your application and beef up your resume making your time to call shorter but there's no overnight solution.

Option B is live in base for a regional and commute to the guard job for a while. Go to one of the AA wholly owned regionals with a flow so you can approach your entry to the majors in 2 fronts (direct application and flow through route). Also you'll have the ability to go on mil leave and get more military fixed wing experience while your seniority is increasing at your regional and you get closer to an AA class date if that's the route you chose.

satpak77

I would say this as #1. how will he respond quicky with a sandbox job if he gets a sudden interview call? or prep seminar ?

my opinion

Otterbox

Guys applying last year usually ended up deferring interviews by a couple months until they returned from down range and the airlines usually worked with them.

Interview prep seminars were more inflexible given their group focus.

Job fairs were also difficult to attend unless they well within a scheduled R&R window.