Helicopter pilot here, currently wildland firefighting flying for a US Forest Service contractor.

Found HN as a uni freshman in CS. Had a 5 year mini career as a dev in tech, but wanted more fulfilling(for me) work - hence the transition.

Back then, I was an HN reader for what I would call "career development" learning, trying to keep on the bleeding edge. Now I'm here for the tech-adjacent conversations and reading the more nuanced insider discussions on breaking tech news(eg: recent FB stories). Another reason for my keeping up with HN is occasionally a post will inspire a new side-project to improve either my personal or professional life outside of tech.

It highly depends on what he wants to do in aviation and his motivations for working as a pilot. I can give my perspective as someone who had a full-time tech career and started the transition to working as a helicopter pilot several years ago. Some of this has already been stated in other comments - but thought I would add my opinions overall.

Signs you should not be a professional pilot:

* You're doing it for prestige. We're decades removed from the golden age of aviation. It may be cool to you to be a pilot - but most other folks don't view you as having a dreamy job. Don't be a pilot for how others view you, do it for you.

* You're doing it for the money. High paying(>$200k) jobs in airplanes are rare, and reserved almost only for captains at legacy carriers, and some corporate jet pilots. You need A LOT of experience and a lot of luck to get these jobs. And who knows how long these higher salaries will last. Some of the best paying($350k+) jobs in aviation are in cargo - UPS and Fedex - which are likely to be some of the first to automate away the pilot. Helicopter salaries are much much much worse. The highest pay I've ever seen was a heli-pilot with 35 years of experience and 30,000+ hours making $150k piloting a $22M aircraft. Given, he only works 6 months a year for that pay. But still a pretty terrible best-scenario pay rate.

* You're an adrenaline junkie who is looking for their next fix. If you want to get your license and go do crazy stunts out in the desert with no people around - be my guest. But you'll be eaten alive in most sectors of commercial aviation without a safety-first mindset. In some areas of aviation, sure, there's some risks. But they should always be calculated risks where the ends fully justify any added risk factor.

* You want to spend time at home. Most flying jobs are nomadic. It is hard on families, and isn't for those who are uncomfortable moving frequently and living the hotel life. Most pilots I know have been divorced several times if they've ever found someone who agree to be in a long term relationship with someone who moves so often and is around so little.

Signs you could consider being a professional pilot:

* You love flying, and nothing will keep you out of the cockpit. This is pretty much the only reason I think anyone should become a professional pilot right now. For many people there's something incredibly special about being in the air. As a hobby, aviation is incredibly expensive(doubly or triply so for helicopters than fixed-wing). So unless you have a career that can support your expensive aviation fix, you may actually be financially better-off flying for a living(as compared with a low/moderate salary job and flying away all your money). Finally, depending on what you want to do in aviation, there isn't always an equivalent option for hobbyist, and you have to go commercial to fly those missions.

Personally, I fall into the "I love flying" category. Even though my tech salary would have allowed me to fly small piston helicopters several times a week as a hobby, I wanted to challenge myself by flying more complex missions and aircraft than I could as a hobbyist - wildland firefighting and search+rescue specifically. This year is my first on a fire contract, and I can say without a doubt that for me the time/money/strain on relationships has absolutely been worth it. I love my job, and every day I'm off-site I wish I were working. However, there are some caveats. I'm single and enjoy being so. I seriously doubt I would stay in aviation if I found a long-term partner and/or started a family - the two do not seem compatible to me at all. Also, I still do contracting in tech for additional income. I know I have that as a fallback career if the aviation industry automates away the jobs I enjoy. So I'm not 100% sure if I would have done this without that fallback career plan.

With regards to automation in flying, I don't have a crystal ball. The FAA moves slowly. Very slowly. The only "fast" thing I've seen them do is add more regulations to UAV operators when they started becoming a potential danger to manned air-traffic. But I have never seen nor heard them being quick to loosen regulations or certify automation systems(in fact, FAA safety documentation discusses how automation can cause more harm than good when paired with a human operator - to highlight their thoughts on the matter).

But I would likely say that your brother will be able to find flying jobs for decades to come. Airlines will be slow to integrate fully automated cockpits due to regulation - and the first crash, I imagine, will likely roll back approvals for many years after(whenever it comes - we can't build perfect systems. And the NTSB would likely blame the system, even if pilots couldn't possibly have resolved the issues themselves). Also, if your brother is interested in any kind of back-country flying, I bet those will be even longer away from automation if they ever see it. Think flying people to rural airstrips in Alaska, flying float planes charters in the San Juans, or bringing supplies to villages in the middle of nowhere in Indonesia. The highly dynamic environments with unimproved strips and water landings would be a non-impossible but more difficult task than typical airports to automate. And the cheap labor available to these missions would likely not justify the additional expense of automation. Speaking of cheap labor - these back-country jobs pay absolutely garbage wages - but I personally know a couple former airline pilots who transitioned to rural flying missions because they were tired of flying a bus with autopilot and wanted to get back to what they considered "real flying".

Hope that mini-rant adds some valuable context for you!

There is an extreme difference in the number of hours and required training between your SPL/PPL/CPL/ATPL. Eg: For fixed wing, you can get your PPL within 35 flight hours at a Part 141 School. Your ATP comes at a minimum of 1500 hours, and you are required to know much more about emergency recovery. The regs in place regarding minimum requirements for carrying passengers and performing commercial ops are there for very good reason. Even when having your PPL(or other license for that fact), there are currency requirements on when you are allowed to carry passengers on Part 91 non-commercial flights.

In the aviation world, even having your commercial is considered a "license to learn". Having your PPL simply implies that you can fly an aircraft in good weather conditions, should have the better judgement not to fly beyond your weather minimums, and have the ability not to kill anyone outside of your aircraft should conditions deteriorate while in the air. Even with my fixed wing PPL, I am extremely cautious with passengers knowing that I don't have nearly as much knowledge and experience as someone with their CPL/ATPL.

Source: PPL w/ instrument Fixed Wing & CPL-H

That's very informative, but it doesn't quite answer the question.

Why are you allowed to have passengers with a PPL if it's so dangerous?

And why does that reason stop applying when the passengers pay?

While I can't claim to be an expert in _why_ the FAA chose to structure the regs the way they do, I have some personal thoughts on the matter. dweekly has a great comment explaining Part 91, 135, and 121 operation rules that I'll reference here.

A Part 91 flight conducted by a PPL with passengers certainly isn't the safest activity the pilot or passengers could partake in. But its certainly enjoyable. Let's take a similar example. A hobbyist motorcycle racer owns a private track, and a friend wants a joy-ride. Similarly to a passenger on a Part 91 flight, a passenger on a high speed sports bike is at higher risk of fatality than a person who decided to spend the day relaxing at the beach. But doing so on private property with little/no risk to non-participants is not illegal. Many/Most high-risk activities are not illegal provided that the risk is only to the willing participants. While I can't be sure that's the reason the FAA allows low-hour non-CPL pilots to carry passengers, I would imagine it is a large contributing factor considering the statistical probability of fatality is with the pilot and passengers, not people in other planes or on the ground (to the best of my knowledge).

Part 135 and 121 operations have the license requirements such that people purchasing services have a reasonable expectation that the pilots involved have been properly trained, and are VERY safe.

Now to the kicker. Why are private pilots not allowed to accept ANY compensation? Really, NO COMPENSATION. Although I haven't personally heard of anyone getting their license revoked for something as little as paying the full cost of expenses, it is against the regulations for your passengers to pay more than half the pro-rata share of expenses (rent, fuel, etc...). This is a hotly debated item, that no one seems to have a good answer for. The most convinving argument I've heard is that it goes back to the late '20s when the regs for commercial pilots started going into place. The history around this is shaky, but supposedly the commercial license came about as a way to track interstate and foreign commerce. Supposedly the government at the time was scared of the ability to circumvent taxes since they couldn't as easily stop and check trucks or trains crossing borders. So they created the commercial license as a way of regulating inter-border trade to trusted pilots. I don't have a source on that unfortunately - more of an oral tradition story. But it makes the most sense to me of everything I've heard.

Another rabbit-hole I won't go too deep into is the issue of insurance. Getting insurance on an aircraft is much more expensive if it will be used for compensation purposes (Part 135 or 121). Even if a private pilot were able to get compensation from passengers or for cargo, the insurance rate would be astronomical(as a commercial rotor wing pilot, I can't find a job doing anything but instructing until I hit ~1000 hours due to insurance rates, if an insurance company would even let me fly on a commercial bird before then). And if you got in an accident while providing paid-for services without proper (for comp)insurance, it would not pay-out anything.

tl;dr You can have PPL w/ passengers because you're mostly only endangering yourself and willing passengers. Commercial operations are limited to using CPL/ATPL pilots such that consumers have a reasonable guarantee of safety. And nobody knows why private pilots can't be compensated (although if someone has a source with concrete answer I would love to hear it). Even if they could legally, they financially couldn't due to insurance costs.

Yeah I remember that post. One thing I didn't ask that I meant to. Does anyone know what kind of implications this would have if a warrant is granted for a machine that turns out to reside outside of the USA?

Extreme over the top example scenaria: An employee of a foreign government installs Tor on their work machine, does some things meriting an FBI warrant under this decision. The FBI finds a way to access this machine, and in the process accidentally discovers classified information belonging to the foreign government and that government finds the data breach came from the FBI.

I may be mistaking, but the decision sounds like an awful lot of trouble preparing to happen with regards to foreign relations.

IANAL, but I would think that if you are hiding your identity you lose any rights that come with that.