Akasha - Thanks for the reply, and its good to here your opinion on ATPs as well. You’re right about this opportunity kind of being a distraction to what I’ve planned. After working at the FBO and being around 135 charter and 91 business stuff I don’t think it is what I want to do for the rest of my life lol.

As for why they are pushing me to get my CFI so quickly, from what I’ve heard there seems to be some sentiment from the chief pilot here that I am ‘lazy’ because he feels that I have been procrastinating about getting my CFI. Before getting this job, I was attending and working at a flight school that went bankrupt last January, and I simultaneously lost money I had put down on flight time and lost my job. Then I bounced around unemployed looking for a job for a few months before finally ending up here at the FBO, and it has taken me a while to dig myself out of this mess and get to a point where I could put more money into flight training. I guess if working multiple jobs to get my finances in order to finish my education makes me lazy, then I’m guilty lol. I don’t want their pity, just it’s frustrating that they are assuming I’m lazy for not completing CFI when I’m working 50-60 hour weeks to fix a situation that is out of my control. There’s a part of me that would like to prove them wrong hehe.

So the rationale of having me get my CFI so soon is to prove that I’m committed to this and not lazy. I offered to call ATPs and see if I could get my training bumped up to the first thing in January, but the FBO wants it done here, and now I get the impression that they aren’t going to give me the leave of absence from my line service job that they told me a month ago that they would give. So now I won’t have this line service job to fall back on. I guess I don’t understand why it is any skin off their teeth whether I do my training here or somewhere else since they seem kind of ill equipped to do training. It’s not like they have a flight school - they don’t even have a plane for me to use to get my ticket in.

Now I need to decide if I should rush through my CFI for this possibility of getting some, but not a lot, of flight time here at the 135 operation, or give up my current job + any chances of flight time here to go back to school. There’s a part of me that thinks in this economy it would be stupid to give up a job and a possible opportunity to fly, so I’d be willing to stay around here and see how things go, but I’m concerned that doing CFI here would gimp my chances of finding an instructing job elsewhere if I do not end up getting this flying position here, or if I decide I need to move elsewhere to build more time.