

Why Pilots Make Great Entrepreneurs - vlad
http://www.earthclassmail.com/blog/2008/01/24/the-skys-the-limit-why-pilots-make-great-start-up-employees-and-why-so-many-are-entrepreneurs/

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dkokelley
It's funny, but my career of choice was being a pilot. I even flew about 10
hours before it got too expensive for me. I was even accepted into Embry-
Riddle Aeronautical University (pretty much the top aviation school there is).
It's unfortunate that it has to be so expensive to fly.

Anyways, if you've already exited your startup and have money to spend, or are
interested in aviation at all, I would certainly recommend it. It's one of the
best things I've done my entire life.

Believe me, there are plenty of startup opportunities in the aviation
industry. A lot of it is broken right now, and people who fix it stand to reap
a huge reward.

Go check out <http://www.erau.edu/> if you're interested in the college. It's
about $40,000/year with the flight training.

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vlad
For $70,000, in 150 days, you can go from no experience whatsoever to being a
certified airline pilot. Includes housing.
[http://www.atpflightschool.com/airline_training_programs/pri...](http://www.atpflightschool.com/airline_training_programs/private_pilot_program/index.html)

A private pilot license costs $6,000 - $10,000, supposedly.

~~~
dkokelley
That's $466 per day to go from 0 to airline pilot certificate.

Airline pilots make good money, but leaving one of those schools you really
won't have enough experience to get a job as an airline pilot, and if you do,
you'll start low (1st officer) and it will take a while before you earn enough
to make that back. The big metric in the pilot industry is flight time, and in
150 days you can't get enough flight time to compete with the lifelong pilots.

A good course for many people is to go right into instruction. That way you
make some money while building flight time on someone else's dime. This is
actually how it works at ERAU. The Juniors and Seniors train the others.

Also, a private license is closer to $10,000 now, mostly because of fuel
prices. It used to be a cool $6000 though.

To go from 0 to being able to earn money flying (commercial license) will cost
about $20,000 last I checked.

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lutorm
I thought the article applied to me in a funny way. I soloed and got to ~20h
before I ran out of capital. Does that qualify me as having startup
experience? ;-)

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wheels
I guess I find the "Why $MyOtherPassion Make Great Entrepreneurs" a little
tiresome. It's amazing how it works for painters, rock climbers, actors,
pilots, family men, and so on. You know what I find it a lot like? Open
Source. Guess why? Can't we just accept that having the drive to do stuff is
transferable and move on?

