PilotRadar

How you actually get hired before 1,500 hours

Without a real picture of the low-time job market, you’re working it blind. Here’s the full picture — and where a deterministic engine (and a little AI) fit.

The problem this solves

The months right after the Commercial checkride are the least-documented part of becoming a professional pilot. Training is a syllabus. The airlines publish their minimums. The middle — first job, time building, the climb to 1,500 — is where the information gets scattered: across dozens of operators’ websites, word of mouth, and forum threads. Plenty of good low-time jobs exist; the hard part is knowing which ones fit your logbook today.

Every one of those jobs has written requirements — total time, PIC, cross-country, multi-engine, an instrument rating, a class of medical. Your logbook has the answers. The only missing step is putting the two side by side, for every job, at once. That is the whole product.

The picture you’re missing

A job board is a search box: you read the postings and work out by hand whether your hours clear each line — and whether a “500 hours preferred” note is a wall or a wish. Forums and word of mouth are genuinely useful, but the answers are general, and plenty of low-time flying jobs never get posted anywhere you’d look. None of it tells you where you stand.

PilotRadar structures each posting into its actual requirements and compares them to your real totals — your number next to their number, hard requirement vs. preferred, with the source text one tap away. That’s your position on the map. Then it does the thing a board can’t: it looks across every job you don’t qualify for and finds the single move — one rating, forty hours of multi — that brings the most of them into range. That’s your course, ranked by what it opens.

Why deterministic — and where AI fits

Eligibility is decided by rules, not a language model. total_time ≥ 500 is either true or false against your logbook; there is nothing to hallucinate. AI has exactly two jobs here: reading a messy job posting into structured requirements (which a human then reviews before it can affect anyone’s radar), and writing your results up in plain English. If the engine says you qualify, you can see precisely why. If it says you’re one move away, you can see the move and the number. And if a requirement looks wrong, one tap reports it and a person checks it.

The hour ladder

Roughly what opens up as total time climbs. Real hiring also turns on PIC, cross-country, multi-engine, night, and instrument time — which is why matching on totals alone isn’t enough.

Import your logbook and /path draws your own ladder — which rungs you’ve cleared and how many jobs each remaining one unlocks.

When CFI is the answer — and when it isn’t

Instructing is the most common route from Commercial to 1,000+ hours because it pays while you build PIC and dual-given, and CFII and MEI compound that. For a lot of pilots it’s the right call. But it isn’t the only one: aerial survey, jump, banner, pipeline patrol, traffic watch, and Part 135 SIC are genuine paid routes, and some hire well below where pilots assume. The point isn’t to talk you out of the CFI — it’s to show you the whole board so the choice is yours.

What it costs, and what happens to your data

Free during the founding period; founding users keep a permanent discount when paid plans launch. You can build a full radar without an account. Your logbook data lives in the database, not the browser, and employers never see it unless you explicitly opt into the anonymized talent pool and then accept an employer’s interest. What Pro adds →