Trips to Nairobi for maintenance meant flying past Kilimanjaro, a sight I never tied of witnessing.īut you won’t get much much IFR approach practice because nearly all the approaches are visual. I was allowed to ride right seat in a Caravan on a trip into Ruaha National Park and won’t ever forget the baby elephant grazing at the side of the dirt strip or the two giraffes that bounded across the threshold as we taxied out for departure (I’m kicking myself to this day that I didn’t bring a camera on that trip). The flying is spectacular, the vistas as magnificent as you’d imagine. When it comes to convert your licence, be prepared for pedantic, rule-obsessed bureaucrats who often see it their mission to obstruct, rather than aid, your quest to get licenced, Usually the firm you work for will help out and smooth the process. would by and large they have enough of their own pilots and immigration and work regulations will reflect this. So a country like South Africa would have very little interest in foreign pilots, just as, for instance, the U.S. Each country, and each airline, is predisposed to hire its own citizens. Keep in mind that job availability and the willingness of a given country to grant a work visa will directly relate to how many home-grown pilots there are in that country. They tend to be quite a bit higher in Kenya. Minimums also tend (or tended the situation might have changed since I was there) to be lower in Botswana than Tanzania. But keep in mind those hour minimums slide depending on how robust the economy is and how much demand there is for pilots.
I went with 400 hours, multi-IFR, and struggled. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t go with less than 500 hours. But you will have a very solid shot with 1,000 hours and multi-IFR rating. Generally speaking you won’t get a job in Tanzania with 250 hours and a newly minted commercial ticket. The time we went was at the height of the economic downturn and small airlines, afraid of what the impact was going to be on the tourist season, were very reluctant to hire. It’s massively corrupt, like most countries in Africa, but it’s stable. Tanzania is also very safe for locals and westerners and it’s more or less politically stable. That said, I needed a lot of help from my employer regarding the latter.
Unlike, say, Kenya, it’s much easier to convert your licence there and get a work visa. I deliberately targeted Tanzania for a flying job. The airplane was based in Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania (about 2.5 million), on the coast of the Indian Ocean, and its maintenance base was at Wilson Airport, in Nairobi, Kenya.
They used the 402 to ferry their senior executives to their various plants and businesses. I worked for a private company that had holdings throughout sub-Saharan Africa. That said, the events that unfold if you go - in terms of safety, lifestyle and job availability - will vary wildly depending on the country and region. Catch on with the right operator and you’ll build a lot of time quickly and have a tall tale or two to tell. And because it’s out of the way, and because there’s so much flying, jobs for low-time pilots tend to be more plentiful than in more populated European or North American centers. James had more than 10,000 hours in his logbook.Īfrica, like northern Canada, is a pilot’s heaven: There’s an endless expanse of geography but very little in the way of infrastructure or roads, so the airplane is king. Yours truly at right, and at left, James, the Tanzanian pilot who was training me.
0 kommentar(er)
