This isn’t the norm by any stretch. If you want to believe it is, I have some beach front property to sell you.

Say you start school in January, figure three months to finish everything. Let’s say, under an extremely unlucky scenario, you immediately get a line with your first month being full. Most don’t finish IOE perfectly in time to both bid and fly their first month as a line holder. Anyway, even if this happened, you would have 9 months times 74 hours still puts you under 700 for the remaining year.

The more likely scenario is that you will finish school and hit the reserve list for six months. You may get flying you may not, all depends on seniority and time of year.

There are outliers here but really let’s not talk the extreme end of things. If you plan on 300 hours your first year and 750-900 your second you won’t be disappointed.