Originally Posted by
Dubz
it would be near insanity to attempt to fly yourself into recency for a desirable flying career, so that leaves the regional option.
Even a bar-napkin cost analysis says mil guys who are non-current/non-recent when they retire or separate would be smart to fly at the regionals as a path to the majors. A lot of military pilots don't want to hear that, but that's a dose of reality.
The costs for buying recency are pretty significant. Even a 172 at $100/hour is going to be a $10,000 bill to get that 100 hours. If you look at real-world rental expenses (even time splitting/cost sharing) of anything bigger than that, it runs into the $20,000-$50,000 range (especially when talking about a twin...aye yi yi....). All of that even assumes that any of the majors will accept the time for their recency requirement, as it isn't "professional" flying.
I know of guys, myself included, who were trying to hold paid part-time flying gigs on the side of their military desk duties. I went after freelance CFI-ing and flying a King Air at a jump zone on the weekends (that theoretically worked around my AF schedule) but could never make any of the jobs work because of having to leave for months at a time on deployments. Some other acquaintances I have were able to do stuff like banner towing and the like, but still didn't get much significant time out of it for similar deployment/TDY reasons.
The down side to that entire path of action is that if the majors don't come knocking right away upon separation/retirement, you may just end up going to a regional anyway to keep flying/earning while you wait who-knows-how-long. You'd be out a big chunk of change and end up working at a regional in the end regardelss.