How to Plan Your Career as a Pilot

the biggest thing that I've learned is whatever path you think you want isn't necessarily going to be the best path for you and it's not going to be the path that you end up going like for instance I wanted to be a CFI at the school that I was at and go you know through my hours and so [Music] forth so Dave thank you very much for making some time to come here on the fly with Tren show and share with my audience of career 2.0 Pilots a little bit about your experience as a career 2.0 pilot so let's start with just very briefly um how old are you now and when did you get your commercial license I'm 48 now and I got my commercial license uh in early 2021 okay and so you like most people you probably had somewhere between 250 and 300 hours when you got the commercial license commercial because it was through a part 141 I had a little bit less than that um I had about 220 hours when I had when I got all the way through my Mei okay and you have how many hours now about 890 okay so today you're working for I think you said a part 135 to just tell us a little bit what you what you're flying right now and then we're going to kind of unpack how did you get from when you were a newly minted commercial pilot through to where you are now yeah so now I I fly cj3 plus so it's a it's a light uh private jet Cessna Out of Love Field the company also has a couple Citation 10 or 10 and a 10 plus but I fly the the cj3 plus okay and about how many hours a week or per month are you get and you're second in Command right yeah um the way this company works is uh eventually it'll be just back and forth we'll be swapping off so I won't be I'm not just sitting right seat and just doing the radios only I'll be flying half you know half the time eventually I literally just started with them so uh I've flown one flight um with them uh in their plane so it took me a while to get through the type training and all that stuff and so my next flight isn't for another week or so so um there the the plane was actually shut down for while because the um the previous second command ended up um leaving and they were already kind of short-handed looking for somebody and so anyway so waiting for me to get typ rated and everything that the plane was basically grounded because they only had one person to fly it um for about two months so then obviously there was a slow there so now they got to build build that back up so it'll take a little bit before I get really rolling and you're a full-time employee of this part 135 yeah so does that mean you get a salary regardless of how often you fly or are you only compensated when you fly this operator I have a guaranteed amount of days worth of flying that I I get and then uh obviously once I go beyond that then I get paid the additional on top of that so I'm guaranteed basically 10 flight days a month whether I fly or not and then after that yeah yep okay and and how did you find and apply and and actually get this job honestly I'm not sure which one it went through because I was applying both through Linkedin and through um bisj jobs um I think they found it through bisj jobs but they just responded responded to me and said hey we found your resume and um it went on from there okay and how many hours did you have when you applied with them I think I had about 8 50 or 860 okay is your so we're going to go forwards a little bit and then we're going to go backwards so are you doing this is your goal to get to 1500 and get to the airlines or do you have a different goal than that I I definitely want to get to the airlines eventually uh I'm not sure if I want to go as soon as I hit 1500 hours I kind of want to see how it goes I really have a good feeling about this operator it's really close to my home they're home almost the almost every night so as a part 135 operation that's pretty rare um so and then they have the the bigger jets that I have the opportunity to fly also so um for sure I'm giving giving them a year see how many hours I get that kind of thing and then um most likely I'm figuring I probably won't be quite to, 1500 after a year so I'll probably end up giving them another year um you know we'll see how it goes from there but if everything it goes as as I feel it's going to go and they say it's going to go um they want me to be a captain as soon as I hit, 1500 hours so soon as I hit, 1500 hours they'll send me to to get that in my ATP done and then I'll uh probably stay with them for at least another year at that point is my guess so I can hopefully get you know as much as 500 hours of p time uh and then maybe be able to skip a regional and go right to a a major major yeah yep okay um so somebody interview somebody I interviewed just the other day he and now I've go gosh darned I went and lost my train of thought hopefully it'll come back to me so if it does I'll revisit that point I was going to make my watch I've got a students doing a cross country solo literally as we're recording this and that was the timer going off about when he's supposed to be landing and texting me so I got distracted in the middle of my sentence and he hasn't texted me yet so I should be texting him soon in any case what I want to deliver for the audience is how did you get um oh I got the idea I got the thought back thank you okay what this guy did that I thought was particularly clever was he had on his own dime they they split the cost of the type rating on the first Jet and he's a contract pilot not an employee he then went out of his own dime and got typed on two more aircraft so he's the only guy in their stable of Pilots who's typed on all of their Jets and he says Tren I'm now I now I turn down flights he says I they want me to fly everything all the time so it was an absolutely phenomenal investment for me to do to make in myself so I Shar that with you only and the audience because I thought it was a great idea and you mentioned they got more than one jet so maybe that's something that you might want to consider all right with that said um talk to us a little bit about like what did you what was your path like to go from newly Meed commercial pilot to a guy with 800 and some odd hours who just got hired to fly you know right seat in a jet what I know it was a bit of CFI work but not all CFI work work is that right yeah that's correct um yeah so um I tried to apply at the school I went to was a pretty large school in DFW um and they have both really a light sport jet or light sport um propeller planes and they also have like 172s and Pipers and uh they ended up not hiring me cuz anyway I I was too heavy to fly the light sport um in there and they they had another applicant that fly everything so that obviously it was a little more flexible for him so anyway so I ended up going to a really small um flight school that had one plane it was an older 172 first plane actually flew that was all steam gauges um so did that for uh only a couple months the plane wasn't that greatly maintained and and so I was having some trug struggles there and so I found an opportunity at um back at Addison where I did my flight training at and to do they had two planes uh plus they also had a two single engine planes then they also had an Aztec at the time and I really wanted to get some multi-engine time and I was going to be their only Mei so um I started there uh and then unfortunately they got in a disagreement and they got rid of the Aztec so I was back to single engine stuff but you know I did some hours there uh wasn't getting a ton of hours um but it's was fairly consistent and then uh I had a mentor that um had recommended that I do do a um everybody calls it right seater program but it's called supporting crew member at CAE which is where you would go to get typew rated and a lot of different Jets and so you s you go through all the training with that uh as you would as if you're getting a a typew rating you just don't take the check ride and then you come back and you do a bunch of sessions of people going through their initial training or recurrent trainings check rides things like that and you're sitting in the right seat doing all the emergencies working through the um check checklist and and stuff with them once you get so many uh Sim sessions done then you actually go back through all the training again and get typ rate in the jet so now you've you know got a nice typew rating and then you can end some experience in the plane and and I actually had about five different job offers while I was doing that program um but my hours were just too low uh for most of them except for one um that they had a mentor program and so that was a company called jedit that is no longer in around um but I got hired there and got some hours there and so that was my first jet job and that was for the Phenom 300 okay and so CAE for those who aren't familiar with it um sounds like it's a place where people it's like Flight Training where you can go and get all your type ratings yeah so that this is very similar there's another company called flight safety uh International safy that's what I meant yeah so it's just like flight safety um CAE they ALS I think they used to be called simul flight um so they they use their that building has like 20 or more simulators that are when you get in it it's exactly like the cockpit and the views are digital but look very you know they're as good of a simulator as you can get yep and where's that located uh just next to DFW Airport okay so that was where you racked up the bulk of your time and that was your last job before this one is that right uh well CAE and then I went to um jedit and I was there for six months until they went went under and then then I did some uh um contract flying in phenoms um for 3 or 4 months and then uh decided I wanted to get back into a part 135 and found one that seemed to be a really good fit at left field okay oh there's my student he just landed and he taxied back so half of his cross country his first cross country solo was done and he's still alive and breathing I'm I'm I'm a little bit more relaxed now was a little stress there for a minute I can imagine all right well I want to I those are the questions that I wanted to ask you I just you know I get a lot of requests from my audience to share the stories of other career 2.0 pilots who maybe aren't doing the exact you know CFI Air Regional Airline path or doing something a little bit differently which it appears that you have done so is before we sign off is there anything else that you would want to you know sort of give advice now that you've been at this for a while is somebody who's back at 250 or 300 hours and and they're kind of thinking like well what should I what are my options is there anything else that you want to add before we conclude today sure um the biggest thing that I've learned is whatever path you think you want isn't necessarily going to be the best path for you and it's not going to be the path that you end up going like for instance I wanted to be a CFI at the school that I was at and go you know through my hours and so forth I didn't get it I was devastated and you know decided you know I this is not going to be anything that I'm going to fail at so I just kept working and found a small place and work my way through there I not gotten a few jobs that I've applied for and each time that I didn't get a job that I applied for I ended up having a better opportunity come my way um be whether it's because of that or in lie of it or what have you so just you know there's so many ways to get where you end up wanting to go and where you think you want to go may not be exactly where you want to go um so just all I always say is take every opportunity you can um be as POS as you can do not give up if it's what you really want to do don't take no for an answer just find another way to get there um the right seat programs U both flight safety and c and there's I'm sure there's others out there I think are fantastic I've had many people say that if you have that something like that on your on your resume it's pretty much a guaranteed interview when it comes to a crew situation whether it's a part 135 or 121 um and you can get into those programs usually with 3 or 400 hours you just have to be decent at instrument flying because you're going to be shooting lots of approaches and holds and that kind of thing and using you know high-end avionics but um so yeah and also I like I said before I'd gotten multiple jobs offers from that so and that's exactly what the program is there for is to get you typed and then get you job offers and and go on so just don't give up and don't uh don't pick don't feel like you have to go Only One Direction all right terrific guys thank you very much for watching if you have questions for Dave make sure you leave those right down in the comments and I will make sure that I ping Dave to answer those questions right on the YouTubes and uh if you enjoyed this video uh please do give it a thumbs up so the algorithm knows to show it to some other people and if this is your first time watching one of my videos and you'd like to see other interviews like this there are more on my channel and if you want to receive notifications of additional interviews you can subscribe and click the Bell here on YouTube or you can head on over to flywi trend.com and become an email subscriber and then you'll get an email notification uh each time that I publish a fulllength video like this um interviews aren't the only type of full-length video that I do but they are definitely one of the type that I know that my audience really loves so thanks every much for watching Dave thank you very much for being here it's been a pleasure and I want to to uh just on behalf of the audience again thank you very much for your time thank you

Channel: Fly with Trent (Trent Dyrsmid)

Views: 14,281

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Id: -cAIn7mNrZw

Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2023