Originally Posted by Dburg30

Sorry for the late reply, it’s been extremely busy here. So I’ll try to answer your questions as throughly as possible. So far my experience has been pretty pleasant, I came here to build flight hours and that’s exactly what I have done. I got here Feb 26th and as of now I’ve logged about 207 hours. They guarantee 60 hours per month but we are in our busy season so 60 is more like a bare minimum and probably means you’re screwing around and not flying like some people here do. The routes are not hard, it’s just circles around the island with VFR reporting points. Every so often you are asked to take a plane the 7 mile trip to Tinian for maintenance so that’s a route you will learn also. That’s basically initial training, they go over everything in ground school and then do a checkout in each plane (c172 and pa140) to see if you can fly. So far no one has failed. The aircraft are another story, they are old island planes that get flown pretty hard so there is always something minor not working like the landing light or a low nose strut or one of the two radios are not working but it’s nothing that will or should down the airplane since we are flying VFR 99.7% of the time. It’s a good group of pilots with different skills levels so that will take some getting used to. You have a mix of older pilots with more hours that are ok with flying in marginal Bfr and then younger pilots with “wet” commercial licenses that will freak out if the brakes are stiff or if they read the Metal and it’s 110@17kts gusting to 25 (which is actually pretty normal here lol). You will have a harder time adjusting to the island and laid back pace/lower quality of life then you will flying.

Hope this helps.