How to Become a Ferry Pilot and Go on Amazing Adventures in the Sky

tell me a little bit about the opportunities and the income that Ferry Pilots can earn and like what is the lifestyle say that you are earning somewhere more the same or less than a first officer at a regional what roughly what would the client pay for [Music] that [Music] Nathan thank you so much for making some time to come and share your story of fery piloting with myself and the fly with TR Community it's something that I don't personally know a lot about I've I've read a little bit a little bit here and there and so when I ran across your post I thought hey this is a guy I want to get in touch with I think that this might be an interest interesting career for a few people uh or maybe more than a few people I'm really not sure but let's let the content speak for itself so let's start off with this um how long have you been a fairy pilot and why did you choose this particular career path versus all of the other things you could do in a cockpit well thanks for having me yeah so I'm in a a professional fairy pilot now for a little over two years my company fairy direct Aviation here located out of Southwest Florida uh really was formed um out of an accident um I was trying to get a job as a low time pilot at this time doing some uh pipeline control out in uh Texas and I had applied for the job and at the time I had about 700 800 hours total time but the majority of that time were in Piper arrows and I think I only had about 150 hours or so in like a 1 172 and the company said I didn't have enough 172 time to come fly pip rine Patrol so I was a little I was a little butt hurt on that so so uh I was out to dinner and I ran into this guy that had a little airplane emblem on his shirt and uh we got to talking and it turned out that he was a broker he was a local broker here in uh Fort Meyers and uh True North Aviation is the company and uh he was telling me that he had a fully restored 210 that needed to go out to California and if I you know had the experience to do it and uh at that moment of course you know you say yes right what an opportunity I'd never flown anything that fast that big or that far before but you know uh the old saying is you fake it till you make it right so you say yes and uh so over the next couple weeks uh we got to talking and the client got involved and the client said hey you know what I don't feel comfortable just letting anybody low time fly flying it let's uh let's find somebody that's a company like an actual company so that broker got back to me and said you know Nathan I move a lot of these a year it probably behoove you maybe to start an LLC and start a company doing this and right there the company was formed and uh that was my first that was my first fairy flight so from Arcadia Florida out to Palm Spring California in a 210 cool yeah takeaway number one guys and I I talked about this in my video uh that I produced just recently um networking networking networking networking networking so absolutely that horse death but if you're not networking on a regular basis uh you are um holding your career back I guess is a way one way of describing it absolutely let's talk about so many people when they get into Aviation they think about like the airlines are the only way to go or maybe that's not the right way to phrase it but maybe they don't consider other things so tell me a little bit about the opportunities and the income that Ferry Pilots can earn and like what does the lifestyle look like right well I can tell you for for I can tell you for my myself and um we we'll talk a little bit more I think there's more or less two types of fery Pilots right uh the way I look at there's more domestic uh and then there's International fairy Pilots which we'll talk a little bit more about and uh I would say for myself uh you know two years in the business the very first year was hard you know we didn't make a whole lot of money it was more about uh getting that time in all the aircraft types and um just really putting your name out and like you said networking right putting in your dues in the industry and I would say my second year this is second year plus now uh generating the company's generating you know uh mid to high six figures um you know we're moving I would say probably on average of 40 planes a year now uh so we have volume like we're we're moving volume um so you have Pilots that work for you you're not the one doing all the flights I'm not the one doing all of them no so what we do is uh you know I have a a great list of pilots and uh the the the crew that I built in this last flight uh we have Nick massina out of Raleigh North Carolina Kyle sungrass out of Tampa Andrew Lael out of Cleveland Matt canning out of New Jersey and Kyle molander out of uh Fort Lauderdale area that's my primary crew right there so if I'm not the one flying it uh the rest of those gentlemen right there are picking up my slack uh and then of course we 1099 or we'll bring in some contract Pilots for like the real specific things if we're moving uh you know uh SE planes and things the such like that or you know air tractors or something of the sort we'll bring those in those guys so so bottom line for you is the owner and and you don't have to answer this if you don't want to but are you would you say that you are earning somewhere more the same or less than a first officer at a regional I would say that I'm earning less I said I would say on learning less I think that you know if the business was was was producing mid six figures I'm probably I'm probably taking 55 60 Grand of that you know maybe maybe a little bit half of that um you know as far as my salary but again you got to look at it this way too I'm two years into this business right yeah you're building so we're still building it and um you know this this last recent fery that we just uh had an amazing opportunity to be part of uh really has open up the doors and we're starting to put things in um in motion to start going International and I think like once we start uh transitioning more from the domestic North American uh routes and we start moving more International I would honestly say that would be comparable to First officer um you know um there there there's some of the great fery Pilots that are out there right now um there's Sarah over at full throt uh you know obviously everybody knows Carrie McCauley uh you know the author of the ferry pilot um you got David pler over there in uh I believe England with alfha 2 Bravo Sam ruford and Eric Samson are all pretty big names and uh you know Oceanic uh fairy fighing and uh you know I they inspire me to be a lot like them uh that's where I want to bring on my company is is more to that International level I think in doing that I think risk is going to be a lot higher but I also think the reward is going to be there as well and I think it would be worth it um but it takes you know perseverance and it's going to take a lot of Education uh and then opportunity you're going to have to form those opportunities y yeah so what is it let's say a client wants to Ferry a cirrus across the pond what is what roughly what would the client pay for that uh roughly I think I think right now the the going rate if it's just simply going I don't know uh us over there we're probably looking somewhere between 11 and 16 Grand just depending uh I think that's about the the the the the range and I know that there's a big range there but it all depends on weather uh you know fees and exactly where it's going into Europe yep fair enough so when you hear people saying that Ferry piloting is only for low time Pilots you know obviously those names that you just rattled off are not low time pilot not low time Pilots what's your reaction to that can low time Pilots do this but it's not only for low time Pilots well I I would be a hypocrite if I didn't say low time Pilots could do it because I was that low time pilot um I think that fairy flying is a really good alternative um if you don't want to go the CFI route with that being said okay uh should a 300 total time pilot try to take a plane over the pond well number one you the insurance company's never going to let you do that uh should a 300 you know total time pilot be flying 2,000 miles across the country on its first one probably not very wise you know but can you start in your local area and you start doing three 500 naal Mile flights in a 172 182 and start building your repertoire uh to get better absolutely you can but when we're talking about professional Ferry Pilots right especially the names I just me and we have thousands of hours in a cockpit we spend countless hours um uh researching uh the flights mitigating the risks that are involved the planning is um the planning a lot uh this last flight that we just did to uh IO Canada um back down to Lakeland Florida I bet my team and I I bet we had five days of planning you know we have five days of planning uh involved um you know it's not it's not easy it's not something that you can just go down and say well I'm going to go fly an airplane 1500 miles across the country uh because a lot of the times the airplanes aren't in the best shape that they should be in right A lot of them are hanger queens or ramp queens or whatever you want to say so so let's let's let's dive into that trip a little bit more so the the point of origination was where it was I I'm gonna say it wrong but ialt Canada that's gonna be Charlie Yan way up North way up North Charlie Yankee foxr Bravo would be the identifier and going back to Lakeland Florida um and the story behind that is um there was a company and I won't say any names now but uh there was a company that was hired I believe out of Austria uh on the behalf of uh the Turkish Airlines Flight Academy in turkey and uh they brought over some some Pilots to move 11 aircraft out of the Cessna factory uh and I guess their plan was to flying back to Turkey and whatever happened I wasn't there um the last man uh got stuck in some bad weather and it seems like maybe ran out of fuel uh trying to get into AOW and uh one aircraft was lost thank goodness uh he survived um but upon that obviously that uh contract was cancelled and we had 10 brand new 172s stuck up there in Canada and they need to be rescued and that's where my company came in for the rescue mission uh so we built a team of uh guys I told you and we had about four or five days in planning and uh we executed them it took about 27 hours uh per trip so we did two trips we moved six the first time and then we went back and picked up four more so it took us 11 days in total to get all of them down here into Florida safely and then um Brad Neil out of Lakeland Florida has been in business for 30 something years he take the Wings off and container them and ship them over to uh turkey and that was and how did you end up being the recipient of that contract after the plane was lost was that again more networking that is 110% networking I cannot stress that enough so one of my biggest clients uh is airmart out Alexon Kentucky uh absolutely fantastic company to work for um I've been moving their planes now for a year or so and and we do we do quite a bit of business with them and uh the broker that was dealing the deal with the Turkish Airlines uh reached out to um airart and airart you know to said that I would that my company would be able to handle it and that's exactly how we got brought in okay and help me a little understand too the planning aspect so you've got this big trip what you you know let's not spend 45 minutes talking about planning but let's spend a couple of minutes like what are some of the things that go into planning a safe Ferry trip sure absolutely um well the first thing is that we want to know uh we want to know what kind of equipment we're dealing with you know what what is the history of the aircraft uh you know uh what kind of condition they're in so we're going to have team members uh looking at maintenance records we're going to be looking at paperwork making sure that everything's legal and it's good to go and we'll kind of condition those airplanes in uh the next we'll go into the planning phase and that's just you know where are they at and where are they going you know what kind of uh risk are we going to have associated with that what kind of resources are we going to need for example a lot of people don't know this but in Canada there's a lot of places that don't have fuel pumps so you manually have to fuel the aircraft out of 55 gallon drums so you have to have a pump and you have to have the hosing and you have to be able to do it that way um so a lot of that logistic research has to go into that uh and then ultimately we just have to make sure we have enough fuel to get there do we have maintenance if something would go down do we have maintenance do we have alternates um and we want three plans like one of the things I always tell my guys is hey have three plans and we need two of the three to work if we don't have two of the three plans to work then we probably need to revise and look at what we're doing that way we always have a an exit strategy and we always have a plan for contingencies and I assume all your guys are instrument rated everyone is instrument rated all my guys are CFI see if double eyes I'm the only one that's not okay fair enough um all right so how do you deal so there's a lot of different times of planes in the world so there's a lot of different types of clients there's a lot of opportunities how do you deal with it when someone says hey I need you to move my insert name and model of aircraft here and you've never flown that plane before oh now this is a great question so there's there's there's the right way and then there's the wrong way right sometimes it's just uh full send you know you uh you get as much information about the airplane as you can uh you read Po's you find the limitations you go and you speak to flight instructors or people have experience in that aircraft right as long as it's not going to be an insurance issue right so some of our clients just self-insure that they're not part of an insurance and you got to weigh out the risk and you and you and you fly like for example um back in the day I never flown a money didn't have an opportunity to go get Mooney time client was fine with it I went and flew in Mooney I had five hours to figure out how to land it it was not a problem right but when we're talking about professionally moving aircraft uh most of the insurance companies are going to require at least 25 to 50 hours in type uh hence why my team is built with a bunch of flight instruct uh they all come from various backgrounds you know so if it's one of those unique aircraft one of my guys are going to be able to to to have the time in there to give some instruction uh and that's really the only thing you can do yeah you have to have the time in the platform what are some of the mistakes that new or inexperienced fairy pilots make and you can speak from personal experience or stuff you've seen I don't really care so one of the things that I seen uh early on is I would hire some lower time Pilots um and they would cross the the Rockies and they would get that very first taste of Mountain Wave and I would get a phone call and they would say I don't think I can move this airplane the rest of the way I got beat up pretty bad uh understanding of weather and weather patterns that's another really big thing um had some lower time Pilots get stuck in some pretty Nast weather nasty weather um you know just might not have that and then finally I really think it's just a matter of uh being able to to plan and have to have the knowledge of knowing how to get out of trouble we all can get in trouble you know but the experience you know the hours of building time what that teaches you is how to get out of trouble and how to stay out of trouble right um I think uh what do they say um when it comes to risk management if you don't know you're in trouble if you're ignorant you know to not knowing that there's you know a level of danger how are you supposed to mitigate that risk so that's where that's where the flight time and the experience comes in you know and that that goes back to you know can a can a low time pilot do the job sure but are they going to be as proficient uh are they going to be as safe as somebody with you know say around 800,000 to $1500 you know and I think that's the difference so this question um might be tricky for you to answer because you've been a fery pilot for such a you know only two years but the question is how does fery piloting fair in the various ups and downs of the economic cycle so I'm guessing maybe you've talked to other fairy Pilots probably talked to quite a number of them who maybe been doing this for a long time like really how the the root of the question is simple how stable of a career path is this versus say going and being a a first officer at a regional or even at a major right I I think that you're always going to have more stability you know going to a regional or you know major airline or 135 operation I I just think that's just true um remember we talked about building relationships and we talked about word of mouth and and uh getting your name out there some of these you know big name uh fery Pilots I mean they're incredibly stable you know their their name Echoes through the entire business um I see uh Mr Eric Samson moving airplanes back and forth across the pond at least two three four times a month I swear that's what it seems to be anyway so I would say if you if you you know looked in their position I would say it would be incredibly stable uh for the new kid on the Block for me uh I think it's been stable this last year I think we're seeing a nice uptrend um but again with the economy here in the United States uh I think that uh you know it's going to be shaky for a little bit you know I think it's going to be shaky underneath this economy um but once things pan out I think that things will improve okay for me for us and so my final question is for for the folks who are still with us and listening and thinking hey man I I kind of might like to be a fairy pilot right whether they want to work for someone like you or they want to start their own gig what's some of your advice on getting the career kind of off the ground so to speak I I think the very first thing that we hit uh that we need to say is you got to build those relationships networking networking networking I think number two you have to take the risk you know you don't need to go work for somebody go start you in LLC write a business plan go speak to some Brokers that are in your local area tell them that you'll F your airplane right start small baby steps and start working at getting bigger and bigger um as you do that and you climb the little bit louder you can take more risk and take more risk fly faster and bigger airplanes you know I I did this out of accident this was something that fell in my lap I had no intention to um ever become a fery pilot in fact I went wanted to go fly airam medical because my last career I was a paramedic and I wanted to get into airam medical and this just happened to fall in my lap and I happened to be pretty good at it so I'm going to run at it so that's what I would say I would say go and take the risk start your own company you know do your own thing just be safe about it um so then I'll add on one more question let's suppose that someone decides to do that and they get a gig and they're like hey man I need you to figy this plane 500 miles they have no idea what to charge what's sort of the going rate for a domestic 500 mile trip in a say a Cesar say me too so I can speak so I can speak for my company is generally uh single engine planes are $500 a day plus expenses is pretty much the going rate kind of the industry standard uh Twins start somewhere between 650 750 just depending on what type of twin that that would be and then you got your specialty aircraft and your special aircraft can just be like anything turbin or jets and those are really contracted out by the day rate you know when you go and you speak to the pilot you know like hey what kind of day rate are you expecting they'll shoot you a number and if it's reasonable they generally get what they asked for because they put the dues in to get that experience to fly that airplane yeah yeah all right Nathan for the folks who might want to be able to get in touch with you either to talk about being a pilot or maybe someone is listening and they need a plane moved what what's your company URL all right so it's uh Ferry DCT at uh at.com and then email you can get me at fairy dctg mail.com and that's fairy direct Aviation terrific well thank you so much for and and sharing your experience in the ferry pilot World folks if you have a question uh for Nathan please make sure you leave it down in the comments Nathan when the video is live I'll make sure that you're aware of it so you can keep an eye on those comments and hopefully we'll help a few people out absolutely and I'm always here for questions too so feel free to email me as well if you have questions or you want to get into the business I'll definitely take the time to speak with you all right wonderful thank you so much you too byebye

Channel: Fly with Trent (Trent Dyrsmid)

Views: 14,835

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Id: pJCa_JOZH6o

Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2023