There are so many ways to get from student pilot to professional pilot. There are different end goals and different routes to get there. At every crossroads we weighed our options and chose the shortest road even if it was toughest, which may not work for everyone.
My husband and I were born and raised in the suburbs of Seattle. After graduating high school in 2006 we moved to Spokane where we both attended a community college. My dream program was at this school and it just so happened that the University of North Dakota (his dream school) had a satellite commercial aviation program at the same community college. We spent a year in Spokane and then transferred to UND, packed our bags and moved to the eastern border of North Dakota in a very small college town called Grand Forks. We spent two years in North Dakota before graduating with our bachelor degrees. Before you wonder how on earth we walked away with bachelor degrees after 3 years, let me explain. My husband was smart enough to do running start in high school so when he graduated from high school in 2006 he already had an associate's degree. I transferred my schooling completely online when we moved, took more than a full time student's load and always took a full load during the summer.
After graduating from college in 2009, I decided I didn't care much for the frigid cold and missed home. We moved back to Seattle in the prime of the recession and struggled to find jobs. No one was hiring and those that were wanted way more experience than we had. For 6 months my husband searched for work flight instructing before he finally got on with a company. Only to find out it was part time and offered very little flight time for the amount of ground time put in. We started to expand our search and after living back in Seattle for a year we packed our bags again and this time we headed south to Phoenix, Arizona. My husband got on with a flight school, full time salaried position. We were well aware that salary meant he was going to be working hard, long hours, and he was. But he got the flight hours he needed and I don't think he could have done it anywhere else in that short of time.
Currently, the FAA requires any commercial pilot to have an ATP rating. This rating requires a minimum of 1500 flight hours. Which means the days of pilots being hired straight out of college are long over. My husband graduated from UND with roughly 300 hours and wasn't hired on with a regional airline until he had 1800 hours.
At the time that he was looking to get on with a regional airline, the ATP rule had not yet been implemented. The minimum amount of hours required was 1000 hours, which he had after working at the flight school in Phoenix for a year. He started applying to airlines right away but had his eyes set on a very specific airline for quite a few reasons. It took another year for the entire process to take place but finally in Fall of 2012 he became a regional commercial airline pilot at the airline he always wanted. I'll never forget the crazy chaos of that time and how happy we were to be able to move home.
The last two years of living the life of a regional airline pilot's wife has been a completely new experience that nothing can really prepare you for. But hopefully my experience won't leave you as in the dark about it all as I was.
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