SIC- Pros and Cons

[wbrady755]

Morning guys,

 

First off, I would like to say how great it is that this forum is so active with career advice. Mentorship is worth its weight in gold.

 

I have seen a few job postings for SIC (offshore mostly), and the benefits are pretty clear- build total time, get your foot in the door of a big company, etc.

 

But what are the cons of this? Does it look bad on your resume if 50% of your total time is SIC? Does it not do that much for you as far as advancing your career?

[d10]

50% is a lot. If you actually reached that much SIC time it might be a red flag indicating you were incapable of upgrading to a PIC position. But you'll probably never reach that kind of split unless you're actually incapable of upgrading to a PIC position. Having some SIC time in general isn't a bad thing. Jumping directly into a PIC position for a dual pilot aircraft is rare, so unless you want to stick to light single pilot ships your entire career it's kind of unavoidable.

[aeroscout]

A lot of SIC positions by implication are looking for a pilot who has a good bit of PIC time already.

[Bootcamp]

Where are you seeing offshore SIC positions advertised?

[Gomer Pylot]

It depends a lot on what you want to do later. Once upon a time, there were lots of career SICs in the GOM. They just didn't want to upgrade, for a number of reasons. One of the bigger ones was that they would lose seniority, and become the junior PIC, thus being assigned to bases worse than the one they were already at. There are few good bases, but lots of really bad ones, and being a junior guy in the pool isn't what some people are willing to accept. And some just didn't want the responsibility. What most employers are looking for is total time, AFAIK, and it doesn't really matter that much whether it's SIC or PIC. Flying as SIC you get experience in IFR, some night, and learn to fly newer, bigger, more sophisticated machines. There are many worse jobs in the world.