How to get hired at an airline with Nik Fialka

Nik Fialka has watched pilots lose the job before they ever sat down.

The Spitfire Elite coach and Ready 4 Pushback host joins us to walk through his ten rules for the airline interview — five things to do, five things that'll sink you.

The first one starts tonight, not the week your application gets picked up. Nik's habit: after shutdown, open your notes app and write down one thing that happened on that flight. The disagreement with your instructor. The divert. The passenger you went out of your way for. Do it for a year and you'll never be the candidate staring blankly when someone asks for a conflict story.

We get into paperwork nobody wants to think about until they need it, and why a gap you find today can take months to fix. Logbooks, too — Nik's line is that your logbook is your dissertation: you don't just present it, you defend it. Cover page, totals that add up, no white-out, addendums for the errors you find. As one airline logbook reviewer told him, don't make me pull out a calculator.

Then the other half. Why hiding or shading your data ends the interview faster than you'd believe. Why adding a previously undisclosed failure after you've been invited is a very different conversation than adding a new type rating. The pilot whose expunged record still got him fired for failure to disclose. And the one Nik is best known for — the candidate in a conference room full of finalists who dropped an F-bomb at the wrong moment and never made it to the logbook review.

The bigger point underneath all of it: from the second you leave your house, you're being interviewed. Be good to the Uber driver, the gate agent, the hotel desk. Jobs get won and lost when you least expect it.

Pilot to Pilot Magazine — Volume 003 is out now. Get yours at pilottopilothq.com/mag

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