My bro after shelling alot of money out and working his ##### off got his first gig. He didn't go the cfi route so he has been for the better part of half of year looking to find one.He got a break with guy taking jumpers up. So this is for him and one day i will be there too bro!!!As for this thread goes what where some you guys first gigs and how did you get them?

I had a friend who used to fly jumpers at a nearby airport. The airplane was an older Cessna 182 straight tail. It of course was modified for jumping with the usual seats removed, clamshell door installed, and paint marks on the floor to aid in CG calculations. Anyhow, to get 4 jumpers plus the pilot safely aboard, the plane of course had to be flown with partial fuel loads, which made it difficult at times to determine just exactly how much fuel was on board. Well, to make a long story short, one day he took his one way ticket passengers up, but had to fly quit a ways south of the airport because of the strong winds aloft to allow the jumpers to make it back to the airport. He gets up to 13.5 and the jumpers bail, and just as the last guy departs the aircraft, the enginge sputters and dies. He ran the bird out of gas. Fortunately he was at 13,500 and was able to successfully glide back to the airport and execute a dead stick landing. Needless to say, from that day forward fuel monitoring became a much more precise endeavour to him.Tim13