Pilot Placer pilotplacer.com

Career screening for professional pilots

The job you don't take is worth more than the one you do.

Every recruiter is paid when you sign. Every job board is paid by the airline. We are paid by you — which is the only arrangement where telling you to walk away is allowed to be the answer.

See what a screening looks like Why employers can never pay us

What we actually do

A job board has the listing. We have the offer letter.

Finding open seats was never the hard part — the FAA publishes the operators and everyone scrapes the same postings. The hard part is knowing which of those seats carries a training contract that turns two bad months into a $30,000 debt.

Contracts

Training repayment agreements, their term length, and what triggers the balance coming due. Sourced from filings and pilot-supplied documents, each with a date.

Minimums that bind

Not the number in the advert — the one that actually stops you. For most career instructors it is cross-country time, not total time.

What we don't know

Named explicitly. An unverified figure is reported as unknown, never rounded to zero and never quietly filled in.

A screening, in full

Ranked first by fleet size. Then disqualified.

This is a real entry, shown the way a member sees it — the recommendation, the reason, and the evidence behind the reason.

Ameriflight Flagged — training contract

Largest Part 135 cargo fleet in the country and a genuine turbine-time builder. On fleet size alone it ranks first in its category, and most lists stop there.

It is flagged because a federal complaint alleges a training repayment agreement in the $20,000–$30,000 range over an 18–24 month commitment. That is not a reason to refuse the job. It is the number you need before you sign, and the reason to ask for the agreement in writing at interview rather than at class start.

Source
Fredericks v. Ameriflight, 3:23-cv-01042 (D.P.R., 2023)
Recorded
As allegations. Not findings of fact.
Verified
2026-08-21 — re-check due within 120 days

A flag never removes an operator from your list. It is disclosed, dated, and left to you — a pilot who knows the number and signs anyway has made a decision. A pilot who finds out in ground school has not.

The part nobody else pays for

Every claim on this site expires.

A requirement sourced eighteen months ago is not information, it is a rumour with a citation. Ours carry a freshness date and mark themselves stale when it passes — which commits us to a permanent workload rather than a launch.

1,800
Part 135 operators in scope
120
Days before any sourced minimum labels itself stale
15
Operator re-checks per day, every day, to keep the set true

The arrangement

Pilots pay. Employers never do, for anything.

No sponsored listings. No featured operators. No placement fees from the company side. No ranking that money can influence, however it is labelled.

“If the companies pay us we can’t be honest about them. If the pilots pay us we can look out for their best interest.”

The founding constraint — and the reason a bad review is a feature you paid for

It is structural, not a pricing preference. The moment an operator writes us a cheque, every negative finding about that operator costs us revenue — and a reader who knows employers pay is right to discount everything positive we say.