How To Be A Great Pilot

Career Advice: Captain David Santo answers questions from our Airline Career Workshop.

Paula Williams

Fantastic. Well, let’s dive into the questions, and I know you’ve already kind of answered some of these, but, you know, we can kind of apply what you’ve talked about already to these questions. And if you want me to flip back to any of these slides while we’re doing this, we certainly can.

We’ll start off with a really general one. Abdullah from Vermont wants to know what advice do you have to be a good pilot?

 How to be a great pilot?

David Santo

I think being a good pilot is being a risk mitigator. And anything you can do to mitigate risk. And that means, really studying constantly being prepared, take good care of yourself both mentally and physically. So that when the time arises and you need to deal with problems, you can deal with them methodically, systematically to make sure that you keep your aircraft and your passengers safe.

Paula Williams

Right, excellent. Emre from Turkey. I don’t know if I’m saying that correctly so I apologize if that is not right. How many hours can a pilot fly in a day? What are the limitations, daily and monthly and how many days does a pilot work in a month? I know we touch, just talked about that a little bit.

David Santo

So it does change regionally and I can’t speak to all the different regions. Even in the US now it’s a little bit of a formula because it’s based on what time of the day you started your schedule. But for a two-pilot crew, you’re limited to between eight and nine hours of flight time a day.

And you’re limited to somewhere between 12 and 16 hours of duty time a day. Duty meaning that, you are at work, flight time meaning you’re physically, taxiing out, flying the aircraft, or taxiing in. Now that’s the daily limitation. Weekly is. Approximately. It’s changed a little bit with the new rules.

Approximately 100 hours a month and it’s approximately 1000 hours, per year limitations.