The Helicopter Job Market

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It’s pretty shameful.

Knowing how to fly a helicopter isn’t exactly a common skill.

It takes at least 40 hours of flight time to get a private license, although most people need at least 60 to pass the check ride. At at least $200/hour, the cost alone is enough to scare most people away from learning.

Then, to get a commercial license so you can do it for hire, you need 100 hours of pilot in command time (at about $200/hour if you rent) and to pass yet another, more stringent check ride.

So then you can get a job, right? Not quite. No one is going to hire a 150-hour pilot to fly their helicopter with paying passengers aboard. In fact, you probably won’t be able to find a job flying for someone else until you have at least 1,000 hours of pilot in command time.

How do you build that time? Most people do it by becoming a flight instructor or CFI. That’s more training, more requirements, and another check ride. Then shamefully low pay rates — maybe $15 to $25/hour? That might sound good, but we’re not talking about a 40-hour work week. You get paid based on when you teach. That might be 10 or 20 hours a week. I don’t know too many people who can live on that.

(I did it the more expensive way. I bought a helicopter and flew the paint off it. Figuratively, of course.)

Captain MariaSo now you’ve got 1,000 hours of PIC time, accumulated over a period of about 2 to 3 years. You’re ready for a “real” job. Fly tours at the Grand Canyon (like I did). It’s great experience, but the pay is only slightly better than what a CFI gets. Fly in the Gulf of Mexico, bringing oil rig workers and VIPs to and from platforms on a featureless, watery landscape, miles from land, in good and bad weather. More good experience, slightly better pay. Pretty crappy living conditions, from what I hear. And I don’t think many women work out there. (Would love to hear from a woman who does; use the Comments link.)

Want a high paying job? One of those $80,000/year job you hear about on radio commercials and in seminars? You’ll need several thousand hours of turbine helicopter experience (which you usually can’t get as a CFI), long line experience, and a “OAS/USFS card.” You’ll have to work your way up through the ranks on other kinds of helicopters to get to this stage.

And, oh yes, you have to be willing to be away from home at least 14 days out of every month.

My friend, Rod, is among the handful of people who qualify for the good paying jobs. He does all kinds of long line work — logging, fire fighting — you name it. But the long hours, questionable living conditions, and time away from home burns him out so badly, he can only work half a year. He actually spent a winter delivering propane (from a truck) just to get away from flying.

Think I’m lying about job requirements? Check out these links for helicopter jobs:

Even police helicopter pilot jobs start at less than $50K. And they require police training, too.

And I think that’s amazing. Helicopter pilots have an incredible skill that few other people have. They have thousands of dollars and hours invested in their training and experience. They’ve worked their way up from the bottom, with low pay and unfavorable working conditions most of the way. And only a handful will ever achieve the high pay you’d think would come at the end of the dues-paying process.

I’m fortunate enough to have two jobs, so I never have to depend entirely on helicopter pilot pay to cover my living expenses. Still, that tour pilot job in Hawaii remains beyond my reach — until I get another 650 hours of turbine time…

You want WHAT for free?

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The amazing nerve of some people.

This morning, I got a lengthy e-mail from a photographer that started out like this:

Hi Maria. I’m [name omitted], an award winning VR photographer famous for my interactive, fullscreen 360° aerial panoramas. I’m the only photographer in the country that does this from a helicopter.

I can’t seem to catch the attention of the larger helicopter charter companies, evidently they have all the business they want, so I’m hoping a smaller company like yours will have a little more vision.

In April I want to shoot a series of aerial panoramas for an “aerial virtual tour” of Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, and I’d like to make a trade with you: Give me a free flight, and I’ll give you some of the 360° aerials for your website.

He then went on to explain how valuable his photos were and exactly why I should fly him around — for free.

Gee, I wonder why he “can’t catch the attention” of other helicopter companies. Could it be that, like me, they’re in business to make money, not to collect photographs? That, like me, they can’t pay their mechanics and insurance companies and fuel providers and pilots with pretty pictures? That flights like those he suggests can cost thousands of dollars and tie up the helicopter, preventing it from doing revenue flights at the same time?

But the kicker is this: he claims he’s “the only photographer in the country” that does panoramic 36° interactive VR photos from a helicopter. And that simply is not true.

Just the other day, I got a copy of a photo taken by one of my clients this past fall that is exactly what he describes. It’s an incredible piece of work that shows the confluence of the San Juan and Colorado Rivers on Lake Powell. You can drag your mouse to look up and down and circle around. You can see the sky and the water. You can zoom in or out. I’m waiting for the photographer to give me a watermarked version so I can put it on my Web site and share it with everyone else.

So I guess he’s not “the only” one, huh?

I followed a link and found that he introduced himself in a forum using the same exact first paragraph he used with me. Guess he has a macro key that inserts it everywhere he needs to introduce himself. Talk about tooting his own horn.

This really gets me. These guys are so full of themselves that they think everyone else should be giving them their services for free. But if he was so good, he’d have the money to pay for these services — like the rest of the professional photographers I’ve worked with over the years.

I forwarded the message to one of my photographer clients — you know, one who pays me to fly him around. He looked the guy up online and wrote back, outraged. A quote: “What bullshit!” So even photographers think this guy is a jerk.

Will some hungry helicopter pilot take this guy around for free? Maybe someone with a few hundred hours and an R22. Let’s just hope he knows how to recover from settling with power, which is a real danger when flying for this kind of work.

But I hope members of the professional helicopter pilot community take the same stand I have. Maybe it’ll take this guy down a rung and get him to put his money where his swelled head is.

How to Learn Which of Your Site's Posts Have Been Dugg

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Satisfy your curiosity.

I wondering how many of my posts have been dugg and decided to try searching the digg Web site for the answer. It wasn’t difficult. Here’s how.

  1. Use your Web browser to visit http://www.digg.com/search to display the Search Digg form.
    Searching Digg for a URL
  2. Enter the domain name or starting path for your blog in the big Search box.
  3. Choose URL Only from the first drop-down list.
  4. Choose All Stories from the second drop-down list.
  5. Choose From All Time from the third drop-down list.
  6. Click Search.

Digg searches through its archives and displays a list of posts from your blog that have been dugg, along with the number of diggs.

It’s as simple as that.

Twitter / johnedwards

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A Web 2.0 campaign.

It’s really out of control. All the candidates interested in appealing to younger, hipper voters have begun using Web 2.0 technology to reach the masses.

John Edwards is doing it with Twitter.

Twitter — in case you don’t know — is a relatively new Web service that’s like a huge chat room. You enter your comment about what you’re doing at that very moment and it appears in a public timeline, which is automatically refreshed every 2 minutes. The result: an almost live list of what twitterers all over the world are doing.

John Edwards has a twitter account, and although he doesn’t bore us with regular reports of what he’s eating and thinking and watching on television every five minutes (like many other twitters do), it isn’t exactly interesting reading. (Actually, none of it is.) But he’s got over 1,000 “friends” on Twitter who watch his twitting — is that the right word? — and they might just vote for him.

Any thoughts on Twitter? I’d like to read them. Use the comments link.

I’d also like to read opinions about other political candidates and their Web 2.0 efforts.

And if you’d like to read the drivel I’m adding to Twitter, you can find it here.

Blog for Money?

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Yeah. Right.

Today I had my last correspondence with the folks at yet another blog-for-money Web site.

It’s a new trend. Someone with a server and bandwidth and a Google Adsense account starts a multi-blog site. They lure in bloggers who’d like to be paid for their blogging efforts. They get these people to contribute original content to the blogs, which are just jam-packed with Google Adsense ads, and sit back to collect the revenue, giving a portion of the proceeds to these bloggers.

They tell you up front that you’re paid based on the ad revenue earned by your blog or topic or “channel.” They even admit that you won’t get 100% of the money. Sometimes they hint at how much you could earn. They always tell you how little work you’ll have to do.

You sign up and go at it, meeting your obligations. But because the blog is poorly promoted, no one visits except your fellow bloggers. And they don’t click ad links. And let’s face it: blog readers have lots of blogs to read. Launching a new blog by yourself is no small feat, especially when the blog’s format is set in stone and obviously created to display the maximum number of ads.

So there’ s no revenue on the 50-100 hits you can expect each week.

The end result: a complete waste of your time.

I know this firsthand. I bought into one of these schemes and almost bought into another. Fortunately, the first one taught me a lesson. (Too bad I came up with such a nice domain name for these folks to register.) The one I worked for had more window real estate dedicated to ads than content. That should have been a good hint at what it was all about. I’ll be clearing out all my content later this week. They can find some other sucker to add fresh content to the site.

Have you been tempted or even lured in by one of these schemes? If so, I’d like to hear from you. Use the Comments link to tell your tale. You don’t need to get specific with domain names or other details. But you can if you like. Just let the rest of us know what’s out there.