Bread and butter of the GOM Oil & Gas is still Day VFR Bell 407/206L4's. Entry pay is around $50K for a 7/7 schedule with $300 per day for days flown over schedule.
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I want to be a professional (non-airline) pilot when I grow up
- Thread starter Gatordev
- Start date
Bread and butter of the GOM Oil & Gas is still Day VFR Bell 407/206L4's. Entry pay is around $50K for a 7/7 schedule with $300 per day for days flown over schedule.
Can someone expound on why the poly is a barrier - are they asking really incriminating questions during the poly or if you simply have ever embezzled $10,000 dollars from a former employer?
Dangerous - from the sheer number of vectors of opportunity that can create a chain of events leading to mishap. How its billed as part 135 still amazes me - the level of controls and systemic safety governance mechanisms are laughable. Its a profitable game - and thanks to Medicare and Insurance regs, an effective money maker for the operators.
Now it is also fun, demanding flying. NVG's are helping but the core issue is still operations to destinations that lack weather reporting or TAF/prognostics. You go in to this job swearing you will never be "that guy" who presses into weather and does a real estate deal as a result of CFIT. But it still happens. Ops cultures at all major players (Air Methods, PHI, etc) punish pilots for doing the right thing when encountering marginal VFR / inadvertent IMC.
Its great flying, awesome flying. Pay is still rather poor and management cultures draconian. But boy is the flying awesome.
Entry pay right now is zero, since no one appears to be hiring. GOM seems like a great gig, but for now, it appears to not be a gig at all.
I can't speak to Air Methods (they dropped off my list pretty quick), but after talking with current employees at other "majors" (including PHI), your statement seems to be 180 out from the current environment.
Not anymore. 407's and L-4's fly the shelf. The shelf is dead. Everything is deep water which means S-76's, AW-139's and S-92's.
Actually, there have been multiple furloughs for oil and gas. Unfortunately, I don't know anyone in the GOM who is hiring. With the shale revolution, I don't see this changing.
Good question. I would assume parked if they think the contracts will come back, sold if they think the situation is permanent. There are a couple of websites devoted to offshore flying that could probably answer your question better. I do know the three big GOM companies do not have near the amount of pilots they had 5 years ago.
GOM oil is more expensive than either shale or Middle Eastern oil - they really need oil to go up a little bit. As for natural gas, once the infrastructure builds out in the Bakken and Permian basins, it will provide brutal competition to the GOM.
It seems like PHI has pivoted a bit towards a little more Air Ambulance than in the past. Since they do their own work, I would think it would be a "less expensive" option for them to mod their 407s for AA. But that's a guess.
Well, there is a nice rotor testpilot job over on USAJOBS with a starting pay of $103,000. The required flight hours aren't too high, but it does require hat you have test pilot training. You can see it here...https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/463635600/
samb
Active Member
That's where I'm hoping to head in a few months. I've started making contacts there and as soon as I have a predictable exit from the Army I'll be putting in applications. It seems like a nice gig to fly and be home every night.
They are making roughly $60K per year - if you can piggy back on some Guard/Reserve time, thats not a bad gig.
You have oil and natural gas, you have drilling and production. Basically, oil and natural gas are more expensive offshore for a variety of reasons than on-shore oil and gas, especially with the development of hydraulic fracturing (oil sands are a different story - bloody expensive). When the price falls dramatically as it has, it can cost more to produce the hydrocarbons then you can make selling them - so some wells are shut-in until they become profitable.
Now and for the foreseeable future, on shore shale is plentiful and cheap so unless you have a huge field off-shore, it is cheaper to stay on-shore. It is not so much that off-shore helicopter pilot pay has dropped as the jobs have all disappeared. Bristow laid off 2/3's of its pilots over the last several years, I would assume ERA and PHI have lost substantial amounts of pilots as well.
On a related subject, you may like. http://zeihan.com/presentation-clips/
(Top left video, The Reality of Shale)