Originally Posted by
E2CMaster
Unless you do a TRACOM tour, breaking 3k gets hard unless you found the magic path and did nothing but fly.
13 years, never out of the cockpit, 1880 Navy hours.
On O-4 retired pay, you could probably survive on regional pay, but not have much spare. I know when I did the math for drilling my ass off as a O-3 it was barely scraping by on regional pay, and even now as an O-4, it's not much better.
I'm going the contract turboprop route.
You're right about that TRACOM deal. The golden ticket to rack up the hours. Plus, as a Marine, you're gonna do your time out of the cockpit (school, FAC, IA). I feel lucky to be breaking 2000TT with only 12 years of flying.