Aviation careers
How to Write a Pilot Resume That a Chief Pilot Can Read
✓ Reviewed against current FAA sources on October 28, 2026
In this guide
Most advice about pilot resumes is written by people who have never read a logbook. It tells you to use strong action verbs and keep it to one page, which is advice about resumes in general and tells you nothing about the only question that matters here: will the person holding this page find what they are looking for in the first ten seconds?
That person is usually a chief pilot, a director of operations or a recruiter working from a checklist those two wrote. They are not reading your resume. They are scanning it for a small number of specific figures, and then deciding whether to read it.
Use the categories the FAA already defined
You do not have to invent a way to describe your flight time, because the regulation that governs your logbook already names the categories. 14 CFR 61.51 (opens in a new tab), titled Pilot logbooks, sets out what has to be recorded. Its paragraph (b)(1) covers the General items, the date and Total flight time or lesson time. Paragraph (b)(2) covers the Type of pilot experience or training, including Solo and Pilot in command. Paragraph (b)(3) covers the Conditions of flight, including Day or night and Actual instrument.
Those are the words the reader already uses. A resume that says "pilot in command" is speaking the same language as the logbook, the application and the regulation. A resume that says "led flight operations" has translated a precise term into a vague one, and the reader now has to translate it back or give up.
The hours a reader checks first
If the job is an airline job, the reader is checking your totals against a list they know by heart, because it is the list in 14 CFR 61.159 (opens in a new tab). For an airline transport pilot certificate with an airplane category and class rating, a person must have at least 1,500 hours of total time as a pilot that includes at least:
- 500 hours of cross-country flight time
- 100 hours of night flight time
- 50 hours of flight time in the class of airplane for the rating sought
- 75 hours of instrument flight time, in actual or simulated instrument conditions
- 250 hours of flight time in an airplane as a pilot in command
Put those figures where they can be seen. Not in a paragraph, not in a sentence and not left for the reader to add up from a list of jobs. A small table near the top of the page, with the category on the left and the number on the right, answers the reader's first question before they have finished asking it.
Certificates and ratings, exactly as issued
List them the way they appear on the certificate, not the way they sound in conversation. "Commercial Pilot, Airplane Single-Engine Land, Airplane Multi-Engine Land, Instrument Airplane" is checkable in a second. "Commercial rated with multi and instrument" is the same information with the precision removed, and precision is the thing you are being assessed on.
The same goes for a flight instructor certificate and its ratings, and for a type rating. A type rating is a serious thing and belongs with the certificates, not flattened into a skills list beside software packages.
What not to do, and why it costs you
- Do not round up. Aviation employers verify. A record that does not match what you filed is a worse problem than a lower number, and it is the kind of problem that ends a process rather than slowing it.
- Do not bury the figures in prose. Any hour a reader has to extract from a sentence is an hour they may not credit you with.
- Do not translate the vocabulary. Every term you reword is a term the reader has to change back.
- Do not leave the certificate numbers off entirely. A reader who wants to check a certificate and cannot is a reader with a reason to move on.
One page or two
The honest answer is that this is the wrong question. A resume is as long as it takes to put the required figures in front of the reader and no longer. A low time pilot who fills two pages has padded it, and the padding is visible. A twenty year pilot with three type ratings and two operations behind them who crams it onto one page has made it unreadable to save a sheet of paper.
Write what the reader needs. Then cut everything that is not that.