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Comment by bhhaskin | Hacker News Reader

except that you pretty much need a pilots license to do it

It takes 40-60 hours of instruction time and airplane rental time to earn a pilot's license. Total cost is typically $8-12,000. Once all the requirements have been satisfied, you have to go through a 4-6 hour long oral and in-flight examination. That's just for a private pilot license, which does not allow you to conduct any commercial operations.

A drone license costs $150 to take a multiple choice test with 60 questions, and you only have to pass 70% of them.

> That's just for a private pilot license, which does not allow you to conduct any commercial operations.

Which a commercial requires 150 total hours. And that is the bare minimum. You're still considered a baby pilot in the industry with that few amount of hours.

> A drone license costs $150

And is less than most hourly rates for a plane. That's without an instructor too.

Ask any pilot for American Eagle how much they make... I now work for the travel industry and so get to see lots of articles on how the pilots are underpaid.

I also saw an article here on HN about the seniority pyramid scheme (which I can't find now).

http://www.askthepilot.com/pilot-shortage/

Salaries have traditionally started out as low as $20,000 a year (in some cases even lower), and have topped out at under six figures.

is there a reason why pilot wages aren't more... uniform? it's hard to imagine an captain flying 5x better than a beginner.

Pilot unions are run by captains http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

But how can we explain a 19:1 pay differential for workers with similar training and tasks?

Hilarious. How much did Greenspun make as CEO of his startup? Enough that he could retire and become a dilettante pilot, how much did his workers make?

sure, but what's preventing more (non-union) captains from being produced? clearly there's an oversupply of pilots compared to captains. what's the minimum amount of flight hours to achieve captain status? is it a high amount that there's legitimately a shortage of qualified captains?

The “captain” and “first officer” rankings are employer-specific and non-transferable. You can be a captain at United, but if you were to switch allegiance to Southwest, you have to join a new union and restart the career climb. The only exception is airline mergers - some Virgin America captains are eligible to join the ranks of Alaska Airlines captains, out of recent examples.

No you don't. I got a commercial drone pilot license a year or two ago and all I needed to do was take a test. Anyone can do this.

You have to know things about weather and reading maps that you'll never use when flying a drone, bu it only takes a weekend of studying to pass the drone pilot test.

The map reading should be useful for a drone pilot. The "map reading" in a PPL course is mainly focused on identifying airspace, which is critical for a drone pilot. There are apps that help, but you should be able to reference a sectional or TAC and know whether you're legal to fly or not. I would call it a fundamental drone pilot skill. The fact that is disregarded by so many drone pilots is one of the reasons why the license is needed.

You definitely don't have to know as much about weather for a drone pilot. You aren't flying that far. Sure it doesn't take much distance for weather to become important, but you learn it in a PPL because you have to do cross countries. And if you don't do your weather planning for one of those you can get yourself killed.

Plus, all the navigation I learned for my private would be useless for a drone pilot (hard to do much cross country with line of sight). Learning to check notams and read a sectional shouldn't take a reasonable person more than a few hours.

Do you even need to read NOTAMs for drone flights? I figured you just do the rock test https://i.imgur.com/cKqDhPW.jpg

We need more weather rocks in the world.

> identifying airspace, which is critical for a drone pilot

Depends. If you work out of Los Angeles, it’s critical, if your drone business helps the farmers in Kansas or Iowa, there’s not that much airspace variation.

Even if that were true, it's hard to justify them making 5X more per year than actual pilots.

Right and pilots of commercial aircraft do not make 2000 per day.

Nor do they supply the aircraft and fund their own travel.

It's not anywhere near as difficult, time intensive, or expensive as a pilot's license.

And not nearly so hazardous, for the pilot, the customers, or the public.

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