Originally Posted by
loganeich
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My wife and I make a good living so hesitant to quit my full time job, but once I do, really need make a quick transition to making real money again. I'm fine with commuting for work and travel all over the world now anyway, but cannot move due to owning a business locally. However, finding multi time locally is very tough except for renting at $250 an hour....
The amount of knowledge and experienced gained would be very helpful to me as a pilot. The hourly rate is actually less than what I have to pay for my 182... I pay to fly my own plane now, so not much difference to pay less per hour for multi turboprop time...
So I would not be going into debt, using parents money, etc.. I would be using my previous hard work to gain a skill and achieve my goal. Overall I pay to fly myself around anyway, so really not much difference.
I'm in a similar situation and I tend to agree. I don't really see the distinction. It's OK to pay for your PPL, OK to pay for your Instrument, OK to pay for your commercial time-building hours, OK to pay for your CPL, OK to pay for your CFI/CFII/MEI, but suddenly it's a cardinal sin to pay for your ATP? ATP has become the default minimum standard to obtain reasonable employment; for some of us, time is a real issue. Would those of you who are against it be similarly against someone who happened to have used a Baron or Cheyenne as personal transport for a few years and paid for every hour?
Some of these places offer the opportunity to train on turbine equipment in a real line-flying environment with all the attendant operational challenges. Compared to 1200 hours of crash-n-dashes in a 172 the person who did p2p is FAR more qualified in every respect. To suggest that instructing, as fulfilling as it is, provides anywhere near the exposure to flying in real weather with real deadlines everyday, is ludicrous. That experience is what regionals, freight companies, and corporate flight departments need. When they look at an applicant that already has experience on complex equipment in an operational environment, they see a tiny fraction of the risk that their training dollars will be wasted on someone who can't pass indoc; they see someone who will have little trouble being immediately effective rather than needing 100 hours to get used to line flying.
If you have a lot of debt or will need to go into debt to make it work, p2p may not be for you, there is nothing wrong with that and the instructing/survey/diver/banner route is well established. There is also nothing wrong with folks paying for the training and experience required to get an ATP in the same exact way they paid for the training and experience to get a CPL.