Anyone else have trouble..
 

building Flight hours? Currently have 400 hours CSEL IR with the goal being to get to 1200. The most obvious and effective path would be CFI. However I am not the greatest at communicating and presenting stuff, so I am very apprehensive about the ground teaching portion. Banner towing seems a bit wild and dangerous flying to me. Aerial Survey sounds awesome but I can't commit to being on the road for extended periods of time. Skydiving outfits require 500 and above and prior jump experience. I still continue to fly and split safety pilot time, but It's time to get a job. What is the best job out there when you are low time, but want to stay close to home or at least not being away for extended periods of time?

Ouch!
That last sentence makes me wonder if aviation might not be the right career choice.

I felt the same way , didn't want to Cfi but ended up getting it and learned a tremendous amount from it . However the time was coming in slowly and after 500 hours of instructing I sucked it up and took a survey job . Yea it sucked being away from home but I averaged 120 hours a month and I was able to get to the remaining hours I needed to hit 1500. The Job won't come to you , you have to go to it and will most likely require being away from home .

As a rule airplane pilots are closely related to carny workers.

Another perspective: Airlines hire future Captains, and Captains are expected to instruct. Not only do you have to instruct the FO, but you have to get along and interact with many people and act as a leader. Not everyone is "natural" with this or "wants to do it" as in they just can never get enough "interacting-with-people" everyday, but the smart ones realize that these are important skills and that they can overcome the barriers to be successful. If you think you can not overcome these barriers, as has been said above, you might want to be thinking about a different career, because this one requires a lot of the things that you will learn and experience as a flight instructor.

And no, it's not the only way to get "in", but it is one of the main ways to build hours and experience.

I already hate being your FO. [emoji16]

Such a debbie downer. I actually only want to fly Freight such as FedEx Feeder or part 91 outfits.

I think you've gotten to the first step of the "paying your dues" part of the job. You're most likely going to have to do something you don't like in order to progress your career to where you want. You're going to have to pick the lesser of three evils; CFI, banner tow, or be on the road for a bit. Where do you live? If you live in an area where there is a lot of flight training happening, CFI'ing is going to get you the hours the quickest so you can move on to what you really want to do.

JNB... Seriously? Where is "instruct" on the job description of a captain? Last I checked, airlines (and I have worked for a few) have employees known as instructors who fill this role quite nicely. First Officers are professional pilots with less seniority. Period.

To be fair, the aerial survey guys can be gone for MONTHS at a time. I can understand the OPs reservation on that. Regular trips for them seem to be at least two-three weeks.