Silverwings

Hello everybody!

So I'm looking for some advice from you...

I am a pilot who moved to Houston, TX a little over a year ago. I come from a small country in South America called Uruguay, where I got all my flying experience (Commercial AMEL with Instruments, and CFII with 993.4 hours TT, 157.6 Actual IFR, 63.2 Simulated IFR and 55 of ME) which includes instructing, flying for skydivers and even flying for the former president of the country, hey it's a small country and I flew the guy in a C-182 and a BE-55.

I started flying when I was 15 years old, the problem is that it was 13 years ago, so you can imagine that a bit less than 1000 hours is nothing if you spread that out over 13 years! (Although most of the time I got in recent years)

I revalidated the American commercial license and I am right now working on getting the Instrument and ME ratings on this license.

Do you guys think I can have a chance getting a job flying, be it crop dusting, banner towing, 135 or Regional as soon as I get the ratings? Do you think I should try to revalidate CFII too?

Thank you for your advice, and sorry for my grammatical mistakes, although I am fluent in English it is not my native language, which is Spanish.

Thanks!

lakehouse

If you flew jumpers, stick with that till you get things figured out, you can find a 182 gig out there and make enough to live on, get a few more hours and start looking at regionals.

Grumble

+1. I'd get your CFI too and start instructing. Avoid banner towing, it's worthless flight time (speaking from experience).

Crop dusting is a hard genre to get into, I wouldn't bother if you're trying to find a speedy way to a regional. In the mean time, if you're already in TX I'd go ahead and apply to American Eagle, have your app on file and start updating it monthly until they call you.

Silverwings

Thank you both for the advice!

I can't apply to American Eagle or any other yet, since I'm still working on getting the ratings on the American license.
I estimate it will take me 2 to 3 more months to get all that back, but I wanted to know what other people in the industry think.

I've read a lot of discouraging posts about the industry, and want to have an idea of what I can expect in my situation.

bblack88

Yea, its tough right now. I would stick to what you know, as well as getting your American ratings obviously. I would get all the flight time you can get. These days I dont know if any flight time can be considered worthless.

blade120

Keep trying have you thought about sur america ops?