Originally Posted by
BenMaddox
Thats weird... I thought commercial pilots couldn't fly more than a thousand hours each year.
So your saying that if a fighter pilot flew for 15 years, he would only be flying 266 hours a year? I would sure hope not. And I'm also guessing that most fighter pilots fly for much longer than 15 years, 20 years puts it down to around 200 hours.
Military pilots spend a lot of time on the ground doing management and training duties (military officer stuff) and relatively little time actually flying. Also during their career they split their time between flying and non-flying jobs...ie a three year staff tour at the pentagon or FAC tour with an infantry battalion will involve zero flight time. 2000-ish hours over a twenty year career would be typical for a fighter guy (a cargo pilot would probably have more, but some of that would be SIC).
There are some hardship tours (Persian Gulf, Korea) where you fly your butt off for a few years, so you can rack up more time if you pursue that agressively.
Have you ever noticed that most major airlines want 1000 hours turbine time? This is not a random number...military pilots have to serve about 10-12 years to fufill their training obligation. Most of those guys will have 1000+ hours when they leave the service, so that's what the airlines specify.