Samuel Holmes Pilot Interview with Jetset Magazine

Feb. 10, 2012 - PRLog -- Samuel Holmes Pilot Profile
By Kevin Whipps

When it comes to living the jetset lifestyle, no one hits the skies as much as a pilot. As long as we've been publishing Jetset magazine, we've never really taken the time to talk to some of the people who give us the ability to live the life we lead. To remedy that problem, we talked to Samuel Holmes, a private pilot who works for Discount Tire Corporation. He's been flying for years now, first with the military, and then in private, corporate and commercial planes, so he's a pretty solid expert on how the industry operates.

To get a peek inside his head and learn what the life of a pilot is like, we sat down with Holmes and talked to him about the average week, the pecking order of pilots and the world of corporate flying.

When did you first realize that you wanted to be a pilot?
I've loved airplanes ever since I was a little kid. I wanted to fly ever since I was 10 years old. I went the military route. I was in the Air Force — I got a scholarship and I got a pilot's slot down at William's Air Force Base for training — and I ended up flying a B-52 for 19 years. A lot of that time was in the reserves, and while I was in the reserves I did corporate flying on the weekdays.

What kind of planes do you primarily fly?
I normally fly the Leer 60 and the Challenger 300. The flight department that I'm in owns three airplanes, and they're three different types. Each of the pilots in the flight department fly two different types of airplanes, just to minimize training.

To someone who has never flown private or corporate before, explain how it works. Do you fly at a moment's notice? Are you on a tight schedule? We're not on alert, ready to take off in five minutes like we were when I flew the bombers. We have about a two-hour leash — we need to be ready to go within two hours. So we're on call a lot. The upside is that we get, as compensation for that, a lot of vacation days — at least in this operation we do — but any days that you're not on vacation you're on call, holidays and weekends included. You're always ready to go. I'm lucky in that with the operation that I'm in, there's a lot of good prior planning. We have very few pop-up, last-minute types of trips — maybe two a year.
Read More at: http://jetsetmag.com/categories/aviation/samuel-holmes-pi...

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