Originally Posted by
Rama
Figure about 5 hours a week. Anything more is too much to intake depending on where you are in the process. Instrument is the toughest, takes a lot of time and effort outside of the cockpit. Commercial is pretty easy-mostly fine tuning your skills.
CFI is actually fairly tough also.
After this you can look into 135 flying. A fair amount of right seat in small a/c flying is out there to build hours until you hit the magic 1500.
I'm hoping for the CFI cadet program, preferably with Envoy, but I'd take PSA, Piedmont, and I think Republic has one as well. If that fails I'd try CapeAir's 135 operations, think they require 500 hours though. Figure there's someone flying some small singles or twins flying cargo up in northern Maine or Vermont, I'd be willing to move a long way if there's some relocation incentive; as I've learned from being a military kid, moving can get expensive when someone else isn't paying for it.
I'd say once I get past one cert and have to build up hours before I'm ready to test for the next, I'm not exactly "learning," but rather committing everything I've learned in previous steps to memory. Would I be fair to assume that? If so I could just fly to grind; in that case I'd think it'd be better to fly more hours.