wrote in message
oups.com...
The average experienced helicopter pilot is only going to make in the
area of 50K per year and any school that tells you a low time pilot can
jump into a 100K job is not only blowing smoke up your ass but sucking
the money out of your account to enhance the draw!!!
I've been flying helicopters for over 35 years and can speak from
personal experience.

I can sympathise. I'm halfway to having made the decision to do a CPL(H)
next year and am finding good honest advice is incredibly difficult to find
and guage. Or maybe it's just that I never hear any encouraging avdice
because the reality is so negative. The flying college I approached first
off tried to convince me not to do it. Only when I went back and said look,
I really am interested and serious about this did they take me seriously.
My problem is that I can afford to do the CPL(H) and probably finance the
instructor rating too, but I can't afford to do it and then not be able to
make a living at it. If I do this, I sell my house to pay for it. From
what I hear many flying schools in the UK are only paying their instructors
per flying hour with no retention salary, and they tend to average 45 hours
a month over the year, and there's no guaranteed income over bad months.
It's almost as if it's something you can do providing you could almost
afford to do it for free.

It's all completely doing my head in. I have the medical in Jan and at this
rate I'll fail on mental grounds! It's literally tearing me in pieces trying
to determine a course of action that will determine the rest of my life. Do
I stay an engineer in a comfortable job that I like (mostly) or do I follow
a dream that I've had since I was a toddler? Emotionally I go with the you
only live once angle, rationally I say yeah, but you only get one chance to
get life right...

Sorry for the venting. I'm both excited and dispirited at the same time...

Si