Start flying
Before the first job, there is the first 1,500 hours.
Most of what a new pilot needs is not a job listing. It is the ratings, the hours, the written tests — and other people doing the same thing nearby.
Start flying
Most of what a new pilot needs is not a job listing. It is the ratings, the hours, the written tests — and other people doing the same thing nearby.
Everything on this page came from a working pilot asking for it, not from what we assumed a new pilot needs. That is why the list is short: it is what was actually asked for.
Where to get the endorsements and add-on ratings a career actually needs, rather than a directory of every flight school in the country.
Time building is cheaper and faster shared. The hard part is finding somebody at the same stage in the same place.
People to study with in person, and where your knowledge test can actually be sat.
A dated, sourced calendar of pilot hiring events, held to the same 120-day freshness rule as everything else here — so what you read is on rather than remembered. It is the fourth thing pilots asked for and the one we are working on now.
Before you pay for training
Two things are worth knowing early, because both change what training is worth paying for — and both are routinely got wrong by people selling it.
14 CFR 61.160(b)/(c) require the commercial and instrument ground training to be part of an approved Part 141 curriculum at the institution, and the flight training there or under a written agreement. A pilot who already holds a commercial certificate cannot enrol in an online aviation degree afterwards and become eligible. The integrated training is the qualifying thing, not the diploma.
61.159 asks for 500 hours of cross-country. 61.160(f) grants a restricted ATP at 1,500 total with 200. Instructing is mostly local work, so a CFI routinely reaches 1,500 total while hundreds of hours short on cross-country — which is worth knowing at hour 300, not at hour 1,400.