Building hours after your licence

A commercial licence qualifies you to be paid to fly. It does not make anyone want to pay you. Almost every flying job that pays well asks for more experience than a new licence comes with, and the space between the two is where a great many pilots stall, spend money they did not plan to, or quietly give up.

The route across it matters less than people think. What matters is that the hours you build are the kind the job you want will count.

Know what you are building towards first

Hours are not all the same hours. An application will ask for totals broken down — pilot in command, multi-engine, instrument, night, turbine, multi-crew — and a pile of hours in the wrong column can leave you short in the one column the job screens on. So before choosing a route, look at real advertisements for the job you actually want and read what they ask for. Our job board shows the stated minimums on roles where the operator gives them.

Then work backwards. If the jobs you want screen on multi-engine time, a route that gives you a thousand single-engine hours has made you experienced and still not eligible.

The routes, and what each one actually trades

Instructing

The most common route, for a reason: you are paid to fly, you fly a lot, and teaching a skill makes you properly good at it. What it costs is the instructor rating itself, and that most instructing is in light single-engine aircraft — so it builds total and pilot-in-command time well and multi-engine time slowly. It also ties you to one place for a stretch, which suits some lives and not others.

Charter and air work

Small charter operators, scenic flights, survey and photography work, and similar jobs fly real sectors for real customers, often in more demanding conditions than a training circuit. Many are genuinely hard to get with low hours, and some pay little because the operator knows the queue behind you is long. Worth pursuing; worth reading the contract carefully.

Remote and regional flying

In countries with large sparse regions, remote operators have long been where new commercial pilots cut their teeth, because the demand is real and the experience is broad. It usually means moving somewhere a long way from anywhere. It also tends to build exactly the judgement airlines say they want, because the conditions are rarely forgiving.

Towing, dropping and ferrying

Glider towing, parachute dropping and aircraft ferry work each exist and each builds hours. They tend to build them in short, repetitive sectors or long single legs, which is real flying but a narrow slice of it. Useful as part of a mix; rarely the whole answer on its own.

Paying for it yourself

Some pilots simply buy hours — hiring aircraft, sometimes sharing costs within the rules. It is the most flexible route and the most expensive, and it is the one where it is easiest to spend a lot and build hours that no employer weighs heavily. If you go this way, spend on the columns the job you want actually screens.

Things that make any route work better

• Log it properly from day one. An application asks for the breakdown, and reconstructing it later from a paper logbook is slow and error-prone. Our free logbook totals every column in your own authority's layout, and AvLog Plus tracks how far you are from each hours milestone.
• Keep your currency and your medical in date. A gap in either costs you money to fix and, worse, can cost you a job you were otherwise ready for.
• Be wary of any job that asks you to pay to fly. Arrangements where a pilot pays an operator for the privilege of flying its aircraft exist, and are frequently bad for the pilot. Understand exactly what you are buying before you agree to one.
• Talk to people a year or two ahead of you. They remember which operators treated them fairly, and that is information you cannot get from an advertisement.

When you are ready

When you are close to the minimums for the job you want, the next thing that trips people up is the application itself — what an airline application asks for covers that. And AvLink will match you to roles against the hours you actually have, so you can see which ones you already clear.