The Next Phase of My Pilot Journey

After a long stint as a software engineer, it was time for career 2.0, so today I'm headed to Dallas to start the training path toward becoming an airline pilot.  Over the years I've accumulated the required hours and ratings. and the job search process began back in July with numerous applications, resumes and interviews. Though I could have started in October, chose to finish out 2022 at my current company and start career 2.0 in 2023.

Prospect Oregon

After a couple of cancelled attempts due to weather to get to Prospect, OR (64S), the club was finally able to get a fly out completed to this small Oregon town. The town is a short walk from the airport and we ate at a traditional roadside diner called the Prospect Cafe
where breakfast is served all day. The other highlight of the trip is that there are a couple of waterfalls below the airport and can easily be accessed via a trail off of the end of the runway or from the south end of town.

   

Camping in the San Juans

One of the annual club trips on the calendar is to spend a weekend in the San Juans camping at the Orcas Island Airport (KORS). There is typically a fly in sponsored by the local EAA chapter on the first full weekend of August. This year we had five airplanes make the trip with some repeat attendees and some new participants. We made the usual trek to Roche Harbor and Friday Harbor during the weekend and those destinations never get old. See previous posts here.

Hotel at Roche Harbor

Camping Area Looking North

Career 2.0

June 27, 2023 - At the time of writing this post, it's been nearly one year since the process started of applying to an airline. I have some downtime while sitting on reserve to catch up on documenting the journey.

After over two decades in the technology industry, the time was right for a career change. I've had the urge to do some professional flying and have had the flight hours and ATP experience requirements for a while and with the current hiring climate in the aviation industry, now was the time to make the switch. After doing some research on various flying jobs using airlinepilotcentral.com and individual company sites, I settled on applying to some fractional operations and a few regional airlines that either had a base near where I lived or had a short commute with a lot of flights to and from the major airport where I live to a domicile. With that criteria in mind, I started compiling my aviation resume and applying to various airlines using the airlines' respective websites or using airlineapps.com. Within a week I was getting emails for follow-up phone screens and to setup interview times/dates. For some of the airlines, the interview slots went fast so when it was all said and done the process took about a month to get all the interviews scheduled and completed. 

The interview process was straight forward and with help from sites like aviationinterviews.com preparing for the type of questions that would be asked was helpful. One of the interviews required completing a 50 question technical exam that consisted of questions similar to the FAA ATP written exam. I was fortunate to get multiple offers and have the luxury of being able to choose the company that had a domicile that would keep my commuting to work to a minimum.  For those unaware, about 50% of airplane pilots commute to work, so for example, someone living in Seattle may commute to Denver as a non-revenue passenger or ride in the cockpit jump seat in order to get to a place to start their flying day.

After accepting an offer with a regional airline, the next step was to choose a training class date. The class date is key to an airline pilot's seniority as it is the day that the starts your seniority ranking which will be used for domicile selection, trip selection, simulator schedule, etc. For me, I wanted to complete the year at my current job so I selected a class date near the end of December. This would allow me to finish out the year at my current employer, be home for Christmas and have a week or so to reset and prepare for the next career adventure ahead.

Camping at Nehalem Bay

 One of my favorite airplane camping destinations is 3S7. It was a beautiful weekend with temps in the 60's. We had the 182 filled with four occupants and a dog with room to spare. It was a busy weekend over there as all the tie downs and campsites were taken. Fortunately, we arrived early Friday afternoon and got one of the last few camp spots.  See more about previous trips to Nehalem Bay.

Left Downwind Runway 33

Portland International

Climbing SW Over KPDX

A few club members had never landed at a major airport, so we put together a club fly out to KPDX which is a fairly busy class C airport. After a briefing on the VFR arrival and departure procedures, we departed for KPDX. The weather was MVFR so we flew northbound at 2500'. We picked up flight following early from Seattle Center and after getting handed off to Portland Approach they negotiated a class D crossing for us though KUAO's airspace prior to our arrival into the Portland terminal area. Shortly after that we were handed off to Portland Tower and they requested that we make a short approach to runway 10L. After taxiing to Atlantic Aviation, we grabbed a couple of crew cars to head to Famous Daves for bbq.