Will I Be Single (Engine) Forever?

Thanks to my military flying background, I have a lot of pilot friends who either have flown mostly turboprops, or mostly single-engine aircraft. I also know a fair number of helicopter pilots. I get a lot of concerned questions from these pilots. They worry that a major airline won’t recognize their experience and that they’ll be stuck flying single-engine aircraft (or herks or helos) forever, with no chance of making it to the big leagues. I think we as pilots allow these fears to grow way out of proportion. I believe that you should not worry if most of your flight hours fall into one of these categories.

I wrote a separate post for turboprop pilots here, but I feel like single-engine flying deserves its own discussion. (I think most of this applies to rotorcraft pilots too, but we’ll lump you in with “single-engine” pilots because you’re used to being treated like red-headed step-children anyway, right?)

The problem with pilots is that we think pretty highly of ourselves. (Admit it: you know, objectively, that you’re a better pilot than me…just like I know, objectively, that I’m a better pilot than you…even if we’ve never met.) This mentality leads us to a trap where we think that the type of flying we do is the best, most fun, most important type of flying around…and the assumption that no type of flying could ever be as good. I’ve seen this from fighter pilots, tanker pilots, and Cessna pilots. I think they’re all morons.

My two all-time favorite flights were: flying a 2-ship of T-38s low-level through the mountains of Big Bend National Park at 360 KGS, and thermalling a single-seat, open-cockpit glider over the plains of Mankato, Minnesota one summer afternoon. They’re vastly different types of flying that may or may not fit your current definition of fun and interesting. I assure you though, they were both awesome.

I’ve landed on water. I’ve landed on a grass strip on a Texas ranch with a telephone wire cutting across the middle and more bumps than the roads of lower Manhattan. I’ve flown a B-1 at 500’ AGL, 600 KGS, at night, on NVGs, in fog/clouds/rain, through the mountains of Utah, dropping strings of 500 pound MK-82 AIR HDs. I’ve flown a 60 year-old C-170A in loose formation with a Scottish Aviation Bulldog along the Emerald Coast of Florida with the sun setting over my shoulder. Each of those flights was awesome. Each was valuable and meaningful in its own way.

No matter what your airline’s official policy may be, I guarantee you that there are people there (possibly on your hiring board) who understand this point.

In my experience, most people who discount the value of “other” types of flying either have never tried that type of flying, or only had a brief and unpleasant experience with it. I actually know pilots who have never flown anything except multi-engine turbojets. I know many pilots who have never flown a piston aircraft except for DA-20s, in the summer, in Pueblo, CO, in a rushed program, under a lot of pressure. From our comfy quarterback armchairs, it’s easy for us to see why it’d be foolish to judge one type of flying or another based on that little experience.

Unfortunately, it still happens. No matter how open-minded the hiring team at your desired airline might be, they are vulnerable to these shortcomings. They have tens of thousands of hours flying multi-engine turbofans, so they value that kind of flying the most in an application. Worse, they’re forced to deal with insurance companies and corporate bean-counters who don’t understand aviation nearly as well as they should. Don’t despair though! There is enough sanity in our industry for hiring boards to realize that there’s more to flying than just the type of aircraft. I’ve had the opportunity to listen to some of the pilot leadership at my airline talk about hiring and I feel like they’re particularly astute here. They explained, emphatically, how they value a pilot force with a variety of experience. They recognize that a fighter pilot has a very different set of experiences than a C-17 pilot…and that both have very different experiences than a high- time regional airline pilot or a CH-46 pilot. They realize that the company is better off having ALL that experience. They want diversity, not as a meaningless military or political buzzword, but because it actually endows the company with a wider variety of useful experience. This means that they are probably interested in you…no matter what your background is.

So, where does this leave us?

First, if you fly single-engine fighters or the U-2, stop obsessing over your single-engine time and move on with your life! You get extra credit for having this type of background. This may not be fair, and I suspect it’s based more on a vicarious/jealous view of that kind of flying than anything else, but it’s true. Flying these aircraft is pretty much just as valuable on an airline application as flying a 4-engined heavy like the C-5.