That’s when you go to a JobFair and talk to the recruiter face to face.

Also be engaging with them, not just stand there and stare waiting to answer questions.

 

First off, like others have said, apply. You never know.

Use this advice. Don’t use. Doesn’t matter to me.

I used to work for an interview prep service and have more than 200 successful clients currently flying for Big D and I can tell you this.

There are younger folks who don’t have a lot of experience but are enthusiastic and are volunteering for everything in sight. There are more experienced folks who have a decade or so in the left seat and have been licking the glass over there just doing their line and going home.

Here’s a big thing most people overlook. This is an HR process, not a pilot process. If you walk into that room thinking the fleet captain of whatever is in charge of that interview, you are sorely mistaken. If you walk into that interview thinking you are a shoo in because “you already do the job and fly their branded passengers” be prepared to be disappointed.

Who is more likely to wow the HR folks? The enthusiastic person who is involved or the guy who is just beating the line? A lot of people think this is about hours and amounts. It’s not. It’s about how you “fit” at the airline according to HR. Once you have more than 2500 or so, you have the experience. Now your job is to show you’re not an
entitled douche that the captain is going to want to kill at the end of day 1.

Good luck to everyone. Last piece of advice-don’t trip over a few hundred bucks in your way to a multimillion dollar interview. Do everything in your power to ensure a good result. It is indeed worth it.

 

Maybe not fly in the Navy, but you could’ve been a GCA controller

 

First of all, and what should be extremely obvious to anyone, is to just apply. I mean, duh.

Second of all, everyone seems to get wrapped around the axle over anything that "adds points" or "subtracts points" thinking the former makes you a ringer and the latter stacks the deck against you to the point of being insurmountable. Neither are the case from what I've seen, as long as an applicant meets the quals of course.

For decades there's been legend and lore about what helps and what hurts, and the entire time results have gone contrary to those much ballyhooed crew van axioms.

While I'm not aware of any "too much time" being a points reducer, even if it is for the sake of arguement, plenty of pilots have been hired with "high time". Almost every pilot hired has had some negatives, and all have lacked some theoretical positive they could have had in addition to what they brought.

The biggest obstacle from someone with "too much time" IMHO is wether or not they think the interview/selection team thinks they have too much time. Pretty much any interview team for any airline will push back to some degree that may seem like "bad cop" to every applicant just to see how they handle it. Its reasonably expected that they are able to do so.

Especially in the age of the "lost decade" and the additional "lost year" we just experienced, I doubt any amount of time would be a disqualifier unless an applicant self manifests it.

IMO apply if you want the job, update regularly and prepare your best if you get the interview. Even if total time somehow deducts points (and I'm not aware that it does) odds are they probably still have more than though points to make the cut off all other things equal.

 

It's not the hours you have, it's who you know, at least to get the interview.

The same here as in any field that's competitive for 6 figure salaries.

If you don't know anyone, the job fairs and volunteer associations can provide a place to meet them and pass the 3-7 sec first impression that will make or break your chance for an interview.

Think of those things as an opportunity to catch a lucky break, but you need to show up with your A-game, at the very least.

 

They can fix that, but I believe they have to go through the rectum to prevent damaging the eye sockets.

 

^^^^^ THIS. It’s an HR process.

The one thing I’ll add is pay for professional app review to make sure it is pristine from an administrative standpoint before you submit/publish it. I’ve reviewed far too many applications that were “perfect,” but contained formatting errors and typos and date errors and incomplete job titles and descriptions of duties that didn’t make sense and that otherwise made a host of administrative errors that weren’t related to flying, but will turn off an HR pro that looks at these every day.

 

Here’s a theory: Logged hours are used as a gauge to guess your age.
14.000 hrs @ 500hrs/year > 28 years which means you’re probably 50-ish, like your coffee cold and bitter and your application goes to the bin.
5.000-6.000 hrs is early-mid 30’s.
They’re looking for a particular profile and lets face it, age discrimination is easily camouflaged.

 

I think high school (and college to an extent) graduation dates are much better for that

 

I'm in my late-30s, have been here for 7-8 years and I still don't have 6,000 hours, that would be a poor metric to use. It shouldn't be all that hard to figure out your age with all the other information provided, high school, college, jobs, etc. In fact, I'm guessing a simple algorithm could pretty much nail your age if they wanted.

On an anecdotal note, I've worked for three different airlines. In each of my indoc classes we had at least one mid-50s pilot in the class, with the class at my regional having two. Not a single one of them made it through training and onto the line. I'm not saying that older pilots can't hack it, it could very well be that all those guys just happened to be weak swimmers. It would be interesting to see if there is data on failure rates vs age vs experience.