There are a wide range of career opportunities for helicopter pilots once they complete their training and get a certain number of hours of flight time. While there are many high-paying jobs for pilots, a lot of them will have to put many hours in at the smaller jobs to gain the skills and experience that the top reported careers require.
Pilots have to get in hours and hours of flight time before they will ever be trusted with passengers or valuable equipment transportation. Most helicopter training programs are centered on providing the knowledge and skills that beginning pilots need, but nothing can replace the time behind the actual controls, up in the air. Once a pilot has acquired those hours, though, some of the bigger jobs will be open to them.
Some of the top jobs include logging, seismic work, firefighting and emergency medical services (EMS). Loggers will work for logging camps, removing logs from the forest area and transporting them over terrain that transport trucks could never cover. Seismic work involves towing a lot of valuable equipment under the helicopter to take readings of the earth. These pilots may also have to transport geologists to some extremely remote locations. Firefighters and EMS pilots will, of course, have a lot of responsibility for the safety of a lot of people, and they need to have the experience to handle those situations.
These jobs pay quite well, but they also require thousands of hours of experience. There aren’t a lot of people who can secure these jobs right after they finish their initial helicopter training courses. (Some of these jobs are legally restrained from hiring anyone with less than 1,000 hours flight time.) So there are a lot of good careers for new pilots where they can develop their skills and build their hours.
Some of these entry level jobs include flying tours of the Grand Canyon or around Las Vegas, transporting employees or VIPs to oil rigs in the ocean, and working as a flight instructor. By far, the largest markets for new helicopter pilots are in the Grand Canyon, the Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska. And while these might not be the jobs a pilot had in mind when first starting out, they are the proving grounds for a large number of pilots. Flying against the unpredictable conditions in the Grand Canyon or learning to fly at night over the Las Vegas Strip will build the pilot’s skills to the necessary levels to handle the higher-paying jobs.
Most pilots start their training because they love to fly, and they wouldn’t have it any other way. This is why many pilots begin by seeking a private license before tackling all the requirements of a commercial license. Whichever path the new pilot chooses, though, there are a lot of options for a new career.