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Career ArticlesBeech 1900 Pilot Career Links
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College Flying InstructorI graduated from University in the Spring of 1978 and my first job was as a flight instructor. Over the next two and half years I worked my way up to Chief instructor and also did some charter and corporate flying on the side. In September of 1980 I was hired by Selkirk College as a flight instructor in their college aviation program. At that time there were only a handful of college aviation programs in the country and I soon learned what a tremendous difference there is working in this environment compared to any other situation a flight instructor can find themselves in. For those of you who are not aware, most flight instructors are over-worked, under-paid, and not very well respected by their peers (real pilots.) Perhaps there are a few instructors earning a decent living in Canada but most are just putting hours in their logbooks so they can move on and "get a real job" i.e. "become a real pilot." If you are one of those rare individuals who likes instructing and intend to make it your life's work you generally do so for the "internal rewards" of the profession, not for the "external rewards" of a paycheck. I hope that the same is true of airline pilots, but you do have to wonder sometimes if some of them are just in it for the money. I am one of the fortunate few flight instructors employed by a community college - which means that I am a member of Faculty union an paid on the same scale as other college instructors in departments such as English, Chemistry, Physics, Math, etc. I certainly don't make the money that a senior airline pilot makes, but I figure that if the pay scale is good enough for someone with a Ph.D. in Physics it is good enough for me. If your life's dream is to be an instructor I can certainly recommend that the best possible place to pursue that dream is in a college program. If asked to describe my typical day I would have to say that there is a typical Fall day, Winter day, Spring day and Summer day. In other words I have grown accustomed to having my life revolve around an annual schedule involving the school year starting in September with a Christmas vacation, then a Winter semester with final exams in April; flight training normally ends in May and June is devoted to curriculum review and revision then vacation takes up July and August (repeat - I am on cycle 29 as of this writing.) My job involves a balance (roughly equal parts) or flight, classroom and simulator instruction. Consequently I don't accumulate flight hours as fast as other commercial pilots. I now have about 12,000 hours in my logbook, but I have also instructed about 8000 hours in simulators and lectured about 3000 hours over the years.
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