How long does it take to get hours?

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immax01

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immax01
Many Regional airline say they require 500-1000 hours in order to apply, of course in addition to other requirements. How long does it take to get that many hours if i fly part time, without working as an instructor, and what is the cheapest method to achieve this? Lets assume ill be able to fly twice a week, what are my options and how long could it take?
 
It generally takes about 500 to 1000 hours. :D If you fly twice a week you might be able to average 5 hours per week or so depending on location and weather. Cost? About $75 to $120 per hour depending on location.

Get your commercial rating and you should be able to find some free hours. You might even make a couple bucks. Instruction is the most common way to build the time but if you don't want to instruct--don't. Find another way.
 
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Another easy way to build time after you get your Comm is to fly jumpers. Most of them around here fly about 8-15 hrs a weekend and get paid about $100 a day depending on aircraft.
 
And the minimums posted by the regionals are not always in sync with their current policies.

Last fall several Regionals couldn't keep their classes full, even when taking folks with 300TT/30ME. And it got worse - they had a 40+% failure rate in classes. And flight schools were/are paying 50K per year for experienced instructors in some markets.

Pilot hiring is very uneven, and the majors and the regionals are not in sync.

If you want to build hours part-time on YOUR schedule, I've come to the conclusion that instructing is the way to go. Ferry work is spotty, and other paid commercial flying really requires that you put the flying job as first priority.
 
This varies from person to person. Specifically, the biggest factors are:

1) Budget
2) Plane availability
3) Weather
4) Instructor availability (as required)
5) Your availability

There isn't actually an order of importance, because any one of those factors will cancel your flight for the day.

I went from 0 hours to about 45 in roughly 6 months to get my PP-ASEL. Right now I'm at roughly 50 hours and 6.5 months. For me, the budget isn't a concern, and the plane is generally available. Weather comes and goes, and my instructor is very busy.

If you're starting from zero, you're going to want to get your standard private pilot, instrument, commercial, maybe CFI (depends on if you want to teach or not), multi (may get the multi sooner). You're looking at a whole lot of instruction going on with that.

Realistically, unless you want to devote full time effort to this and have the cash to, it seems most people can do about 100 hrs/year. It seems to ramp up as you get your ratings, since that means you can do more without your instructor and weather becomes less of a factor. Example: Yesterday I flew in 10G25 winds. When I started flying, that would've been grounds to cancel a lesson. Now it's not. So, I got 1.6 hours of time in.

Good luck!
 
There does not to be any sort of average of calendar time to log X number of hours, even for CPs... but I agree that it seems instruction is generally one of the best ways.

Were I looking to rack up the minimum for a regional and had the required certs, I'd instruct and also take any- ANY- paying gig I could on the side.

If I only had a commercial ticket I'd look primarily at banner-towing: I can't think of a simple non-transport flying job that uses up as much time per flight, except maybe some sort of patrol/inspection gig (but that's not so simple).


Certainly, getting paid to fly is the smartest way to do it: you'll probably rack up hours quicker that way and not spend a lot of money doing it.
 
Buy an airplane. Using the best case scenario of 500 hours at $75 /hour, it will cost $37,500 to rent.

If you buy an airplane, 500 hours @ 6 gallons/hour @ $6 per gallon costs $18,000 to fuel.

So you have $19,500 to spend on aircraft purchase and maintenance to break even. At the end, you still own an aircraft worth nearly what you purchased it for.

If you get your commercial and then get paid to use the airplane, so much the better.
 
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Here's another way to look at it. For someone flying without making a living at it, 250 hours/year is considered to be pretty active, even if you've worked on a rating or two. This is why most people aiming for the airlines try to instruct or do something that will allow them to fly for pay. Otherwise, one's job (the one paying for the flying) makes it hard to do much more than 250 hours/year.

I'm in a job that demands a lot of time, so I don't know how typical I am, but the most I've ever logged in a year was 212, and I was flying a fair amount for my job (getting reimbursed, not for pay), I have my own airplane, flew to Alaska, etc., etc. Even the year I worked on my instrument rating and commercial certificate I didn't log more than that (although I also didn't have my own airplane yet).

Judy
 
Instructing is a good way to build the required hours, but please, if you have no interest in instructing, don't do your potential students the disservice of going that route. I think that there probably isn't much that's more damaging to the progress of a student pilot than an instructor who could care less about teaching and is just in that right seat to build hours. There are already too many of these people out in the market.

However, if teaching is something that you enjoy and are good at, then please, I beg of you, become a CFI because the industry could definitely use some more good ones!

If Tim's data about instructors getting paid $50k per year is accurate, that may be something I want to consider... it's still a pay cut from what I'm currently doing, but it's a bit more affordable than the cut I thought it would be...
 
Steve said:
It takes about one hour to get in an hour of flying.
Click to expand...
Actually, in all seriousness, it really does take about a 2 hr time block to get 1.5 hrs of flying in... if you're lucky! In addition to the pre-flight, sometimes you have to wait for the fuel truck or toss a quart of oil in there. If you find anything else wrong in your preflight, it takes a little longer to fix it before you can jump in and crank up the engines. Oh yeah, don't forget the pre-flight briefing with your CFI (most good CFI's will do one) to go over what you'll be doing on your flight that day. Then on the tail-end, you need to have the plane back about 10 mins early to fill out the requisite paper work, push it back into its spot, and tie it down in time so that you don't bleed over into the next student's reservation time.
 
once you get commercial and CFI (if you're into that) the time can build pretty quick if you are good at networking and an all around nice person. ive been averaging around 350 hrs a year while attending school or working full time over the last 4 yrs, just from being willing to instruct during my off time and do other commercial jobs whenever I can.
 
t0r0nad0 said:
If Tim's data about instructors getting paid $50k per year is accurate, that may be something I want to consider... it's still a pay cut from what I'm currently doing, but it's a bit more affordable than the cut I thought it would be...
Click to expand...

That 50K is not for your average new CFI. It was offered by some large flight schools for folks with many hundreds of hours of instruction given, gold seal, etc. I got the impression that they wanted to retain some senior folks to maintain appropriate quality standards while the junior folks came and went.

Still, you can work a "Real" job on the week, and instruct on weekends and evenings, and build time without spending a lot of money.

If MONEY isn't a problem, then go buy an airplane and fly the heck out of it. The more frequently you fly the less of your operating costs go to maintenance items caused by lack of use.
 
PJ is right... an hour of flight time does not take an hour. If you really think about how much time you need to carve out of your day, figure realistically carve the number of hours you want to fly, plus probably about 1 hour. For me, I need 30 minutes to get to and from the airport, and figure another 30 minutes to get the plane out, preflighted, refueled when you're done, put it back in the hangar, etc. And that isn't including the time you spend when you end up not being able to fly. A few weeks ago I had one day where I was actually at the runway ready for takeoff and then the winds picked up and went above what my sign-off allowed for (this was before I took my check ride), and so I had to turn around and go back to the hangar. So that was 45 minutes - 1 hour, and I didn't fly at all!

It is most efficient if you can schedule flying in after something (like if the airport is on the way home from work) or if you can schedule larger blocks of a couple hours, but depending on what you're doing, several hours of flight time can be really exhausting. The most I've done in one day was 6.5 hours (3.5 in back, 3 in left seat). The most I've done in one day period was 5.1 hours, all solo. In both cases at the end of those days I was fairly worn out, and those were just XC flights. If you're going up and actually doing a "hard" lesson, especially at the beginning, you can be tired after an hour. There was one time we were up for about 30 minutes and I managed to scare myself doing a departure stall and put the plane in a spin. After that, I was done for the day.
 
The regionals are looking for people with solid fundamental training and experience in a disciplined flight operation. They'd rather hire an instructor with 500 hours out of a major flight training operation like FSI or ERAU than a 1000-hour pilot out of a grass field in Kansas with no serious professional experience. Being a jump pilot isn't exactly what they're looking for unless you've been doing that in a Twin Otter or King Air or something like that.
 
Keeping in mind Ron's observation, and assuming you have a commercial rating, the banner tower operations in NJ and MD are advertising now. If you have a taildragger rating you could get paid to build about 600-800hrs over the summer with housing paid for. I don't think you'll get paid much, and I don't think you'd want to raise a family in the housing, but it ain't about the money, is it?
 
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