lifter123

Also depends on your location. If you are in Florida or Arizona, you could easily do well riding on the wave of foreign students. However, if you live in a more rural location, you might be lucky to get 40/month.

When I was instructing, my best month (July), was 50 hours. The mom and pop FBO style school are struggling big time.

Not saying it can't be done, but somethings moving is out of the question for jobs that pay 15k a year.

Yazzoo

Aerial survey. I just moved on from GeoVantage. Check them out, fantastic company.

furbs316

Yazzoo, where are they out of and how much time a month? That sounds like a fun gig

Yazzoo

If you're on the road, you'll be flying all over the USA & living in hotels. Eventually you may get the chance to be based out of your home airport.
The amount you fly really depends on the weather. If it's good enough to shoot, you could be up 10 hours a day. I logged 125 hours one month.

SkyHigh

There sure are much fewer students now. Less than half then during the 19890's.

Skyhigh

chrisreedrules

yea... way less students everywhere... 40 hours a month is about the average at the school I'm at. Its hard for a low-time pilot these days. It seems like once you hit 500 hours though, it gets a little easier (sort of).

Ottopilot

I did a 1000+ hour year once doing traffic watch and instructing. That's a lot of C172 time.

Bellanca

I can't speak for what it was like in the 80's since I wasn't in the industry then, but I'm on CFI job number 3 (and #4 if I count my night at weekend gig), and non of them have given me anywhere near 80-100 hours a month. I think my best month was 46 hours (and that is split between my full-time job and my part-time job). The instructors at the 141 school where I'm currently at average 20-30 hours of flight time per month.

It wasn't always that way here, I know within the past 3-4 years the syllabi where I teach have been drastically overhauled to use more sim time and less flight time to save $$$. For example, our private pilot syllabus requires 19 hours in a Frasca! Our instrument has 18, and I know our commercial and multi courses are heavily weighted with FTD time as well. In the past nine months that I have been here, I've logged 250 hours of dual given, but have approx 150 useless hours sitting behind the FTD. Building time as a CFI is painfully slow these days unless you happen to get one of those rare jobs that does actually give you 80-100 hours a month of flight time.

bcrosier

I'll second that. I can think of several people I went through college with (in the aviation program) who gave up due to the lack of pretty much ANY flying job.

I can think of a number more who would have loved to know where all of these mythical "1980's students" were, because they certainly weren't at the airports they were CFI'ing at. It seems to me that the last decade or so has had an abundance of zero-to-hero and ab-initio programs compared to what there were in the 1980's (again, just my impression, but I was there then).

AtlCSIP

Move back and keep flying him around. You said you would go anywhere.

Also, flying skydivers is possible with over 500 hours, but you have to go to the drop zones and meet someone. It won't help with instrument skills, but it will help with total time.