When you’re passionate about your flying, any flight time in your logbook is good, right? Well, it depends on who’s paying for the training and what your ultimate goal in aviation happens to be. It’s easy to be lured toward a nonexistent pot of gold at the end of a very costly rainbow.
A passionate pilot, who desperately wanted to dump his office job and get back into flying, recently wrote to me asking if he should take the plunge. The lure was a flight engineer rating in a Boeing 747, which he felt would be just the thing to impress airline pilot recruiters and bring him quickly up to speed to regain his currency. With a low total time and none in large airplanes, he believed this would be a golden opportunity to add a solid credential to his résumé that would make up for his lack of advanced systems training and his multi-year absence from flying.
Aside from the fact that the FE rating wouldn’t give him any “flying” time, but rather allows him to log time in the flight engineer’s seat (rather than a pilot seat), I was concerned about his being impressed with an airplane that’s practically disappeared from the U.S. aviation scene: the three-person Boeing 747-100, -200, or -300. Unless he had a solid job offer that depended upon his getting this very specific training, trying to find a job with this assumed “solid gold” credential would be very difficult—if not impossible.
I explained that the FAA’s flight engineer certificate is not subdivided by airplane type (B747 or B727) but rather by kind of propulsion, either turbojet or turboprop. If someone was trying to sell him a Boeing 747 flight engineer rating, they were probably hoping to sell this third training seat in a B747 simulator where someone was needed to run the FE panel while training was in progress for pilot ratings. I explained he might do better to acquire the FE rating in a B727 simulator as there are still a number of those airplanes flying for freight and a very few passenger operators. Getting training with little “line” experience in a ship that no one operates would make a nice wall plaque, but provide little substance on a résumé.
For the same amount of money, he could buy a recurrency program that would bring him up to speed and get him qualified and current. If he didn’t have a CFI, getting one might be a good way to get back into flying, even if he didn’t want to teach. Additional CFI ratings, or even just attending a CFI refresher course (even if he didn’t want to acquire or reinstate the CFI certificate), also were good ways to dust off his skills.
Even better might be a thorough checkout in a new aircraft, perhaps a technically advanced airplane. Reviewing all his past training, and learning many new skills, would be fun and financially rewarding. With lots of choices, I suggested he review his personal desires and look for realistic alternatives that would bring him closer to a viable, job-enhancing solution.
Capt. Karen Kahn is the author of Flight Guide for Success: Tips and Tactics for the Aspiring Airline Pilot and a career counselor.
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