Originally Posted by
2nd chance
I'm 6 credits away from my AA aviation degree, I was thinking to attend Ari Ben Aviation now called, Aviation College in Florida. I live in West Palm Beach, and all their training are in multi, they do not require big checks to start.
An AA will not matter much but may be better than no degree as far as a regionals go.
Doing an initial rating program which uses ME aircraft MIGHT have an economic advantage. The reason for this is that you will need some amount of ME time (100-300 hours) to get a regional job.
You may be able to get a job flying ME aircraft as a flight instructor or night cargo pilot, but some folks end up buying 50-100 hours of ME time just so they can apply to an airline.
If you were to end up doing that, it would have been more cost-effective to do a program where you earn your ratings in a twin. Since you would have to at least pay the cost of a single-engine airplane for your ratings, the incremental cost of the twin time in that scenario would be less than the hourly rate.
The trick is that you don't know early on if you will need to buy twin time later (hard to say what opportunities will exist in a couple of years), so you have to decide whether to spend more up front to get the twin time knocked out, or save some coin and hope to find an MEI/Night Freight job later.
The night freight people have been hiring almost continuously, even through the bad economy. It's not a pleasant lifestyle for most, so people quit for other careers if no airline jobs are available.
Also plan on need 1200TT / 100ME hours to get a night freight job, and 1500TT / 100-300ME for a regional job. Odds are good that you will need 1000TT / 50ME to get an MEI job.