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To: Don Corleone

re: high logbook time, little flight experience.

The airlines & insurance companies love “high time pilots”. However, as the article mentions, transport pilots spend most of their time at cruise, usually on auto-pilot and make one take-off and one landing every few hours to a long, straight, most often paved runway.

When I finished flying (mostly) helicopters with the USMC, the airlines had little interest in me or other military helo pilots with my flight hour totals. However, we usually had as many or more landings as flight hours. These landings were to small clearings in the woods, mountain pinnacles & ridge lines, near buildings & powerlines, on to a small platform on the back of a ship under way with your approach path at a 45 degree angle to the ship’s course. Some, like me, have more sling loads than landings or flight hours.

A sling load is a landing with a large weight/bundle hanging from the cargo hook. These loads (for me) varied from 11,000# concrete blocks to a VW bus (destined to be a target on a bombing range) to bales of famine relief food to a 1500 gallon water tank to lumber and so on. Some done at night in a confined LZ in the woods with one man with a flashlight wand ahead of you and one to the side.

Day & Night VFR and IFR time. But not enough flight experience to get interviewed by the airlines.

(Thanks for enduring my rant!)

(Full disclosure: If I had been hired by the airlines, I probably would have died of boredom.)


20 posted on 07/10/2013 7:32:16 AM PDT by BwanaNdege ("To learn who rules over you simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize"- Voltaire)
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To: BwanaNdege
(Full disclosure: If I had been hired by the airlines, I probably would have died of boredom.)

I can relate to that. LOL.

21 posted on 07/10/2013 7:35:43 AM PDT by TADSLOS (The Event Horizon has come and gone. Buckle up and hang on.)
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