Make your time-building count for more.
Many young, inexperienced pilots jump at any opportunity to gain more hours. There’s no question why: with a 1000 hour requirement for Restricted ATP applicants with a University 141 Program Bachelors and 1500-hour requirement for most other ATP applicants, any hour flying an aircraft is an hour worth logging. It’s a big reason why The Flight School at Colorado Springs offers hour-building packages. But there’s more to time-building than total time. That one number in your logbook isn’t everything, as ATP candidates need a variety of other types of time.
Federal Aviation Regulation 14 CFR § 61.159 lists the requirements for an ATP applicant. Along with an age requirement of 23 years old,
- 500 hours cross-country flight time
- 100 hours night flight time
- 50 hours of flight time in the class of airplane for the rating sought
- 75 hours of instrument flight time, in actual or simulated instrument conditions
- 250 hours of flight time in an airplane as a pilot in command
- The flight time requirement must include at least—
- 100 hours of cross-country flight time; and
- 25 hours of night flight time
Though the regulation itself is worth a read, as a number of careful exceptions and substitutions may be made under specific circumstances, the bottom line is simple: it’s not just your total time that matters.
Making sure you make the most of your hour building is important to meet regulations, but it’s also critical to become a better pilot. The more diverse your experience, the better prepared you’ll appear to employers looking to hire. The amount of experience you have is important (not only because it’s written into the law) but so is the value of your experience.
Valuable experience isn’t just for the career-oriented, either. When you purchase a plane or apply for non-owned aircraft insurance, the sort of experience you have can impact how much you pay for your premium. If you decide to purchase a complex aircraft but have little time flying airplanes with retractable-gear, your premium will likely be much higher than if you have even a couple hundred hours in a retract.
It’s not only about how long you’ve walked the road, but how difficult the road has been to walk.
COLORADO PROVERB
Be intentional about how you build time. The Flight School at Colorado Springs offers time-building packages to help you build more diverse time. Our nighttime cross-country package helps students build extremely diverse time by pairing students to fly instrument flight plans in the dark, up and down the Colorado Front Range and into neighboring states. Not only does your total time increase, so does your cross-country hour count, your Pilot in Command time, your simulated (or actual) instrument time and your night time flight hour count. What better, more diverse experience will you gain than on an instrument flight plan, going somewhere new in the dead of night, under the hood? Well…. I suppose you could do it in a retractable-gear aircraft… or a multi-engine aircraft. Good thing we can help with that, too!
The best part of all of this? It’s less expensive. Flight school aircraft rarely fly at night, since most training occurs during the day. Aircraft owners want their aircraft to fly, and most training aircraft sit unused all night long. This provides flight schools, like The Flight School at Colorado Springs, an incentive to discount bulk nighttime hours—saving you on cost even while you build more valuable diverse experience.
Check out our time-building packages and contact us to get checked out and start flying!
