Pros
-Great schedule. 8-6. Many times you only fly 3-4 days of the 8 on. Feels like a lot of time off. -not a lot of stopping and going. Long days. Typically a day is two 4-5 hour legs. So about 10 total hours a day in a hawker 800XP. They do Alabama to Ireland like it’s Las Vegas to van nuys. No joke. -The management does seem to care about the employees and is easy to work with and very accesible if you need to speak with them. -the international experience is fantastic and unlikely to get this kind of time anywhere else. -many times you are 25-30 hours on the ground. Sometimes up to 50ish hours even. You don’t feel overworked which is great.
Cons
None of these are really CONS. Just info to help better understand. -days are long, know what you are getting into. 99% of the time you are Max 10 hours or 12 hour flight time if they put 3 pilots on the plane. -if you do have 3 pilots on the plane, there isn’t really a “rest area”. They use the couch in the back of the plane but it’s small and it’s often crowded back there. Sleeping is near to impossible. Most of the time you are a 2 pilot crew and that doesn’t matter. -every now and then you will have to dead head home in the back of the airplane where it’s crowded. Typically 3 medical personal back there with 1 patient and usually a family member of the patient. This doesn’t happen very often nowadays. Usually they send you home on an airline if you swap crews after you’ve flown your 10 hours. Sometimes you simply wait until the airplane comes back the other direction and you take over at another crew swap out. That’s actually usually how it goes. You fly from Birmingham to Ireland, wait 2 days while other pilots take it to the Middle East, and then you get to fly it home from Ireland. Or they will airline you to Ireland and you take the plane from there onwards to the Middle East. It varies. And you literally go everywhere. The most common though are Europe and the UAE. Australia is very rare. -unloading and loading the patient. This isn’t all that fun. It really isn’t hard though. They’re are many people helping and it goes pretty smooth and quick most of the time. Just something that’s a little different for the average non medical pilot. Better than dealing with grumpy pax though. -one thing I don’t like about this company is the fact that FO’s are not allowed to fly the patient legs or any leg that has an outside medical team on the plane. Which is a ton of legs, and if the FO happens to always be scheduled for the patient legs, he/she can never fly. So it’s a crappy policy they have. I think it’s silly and I see no reason for it. The FO’s should get more flying legs and left seat time. This is really my only gripe with how the company operates.
