Until 2019, I was SGT Tursi, an infantryman in the Army with five years active duty in the 82nd Airborne and a short try in the guard from 2018-2019. Today, I am Captain Nick Tursi with a major airline and a counselor at BreakTurn.
I decided to make a big change after separating from active duty in 2018. At first I was looking at going into a medical field. I was an EMT when I was younger and I figured it would be a stable career. However, after dinner with a friend who is a Captain at a legacy airline, I was convinced to go another direction and work on becoming a pilot. I couldn’t turn down the opportunity for a career that was the opposite of all my time in the infantry: more pay than I expected to earn in my life, no more breaking my back, and more days off than I had ever experienced. There wasn’t much more that I could ask for out of a career.
The hardest part for me was keeping the motivation up and the tempo high when I was moving through ratings and applying for jobs. And that was when it was relatively easy in the immediate post-covid era. The pilots coming up now on the stories of people like me are fighting much harder to get paid to fly. I have all the respect for those who stick it out. I started training in 2018 and treated it like a full time job. I knew that retirements were coming and that opportunities would be changing rapidly. I ran into several slow downs from schools having aircraft/instructor issues due to a lack of DPEs, so I was always looking for the next way to accelerate my timeline. At one point, I even moved from Pennsylvania to Iowa for a job so I could keep on grinding. Ultimately, Covid helped me by creating a vacuum in regional hiring right as I hit minimums. Luck, timing, and being relentless put me in the right place at the right time.
One thing I would have done differently is research my school choices better. I went to a local community college for my instrument rating that had an approved 141 program. After I got there, I found out that they had over sold the program. They had only a few aircraft of several different types with no in-house maintenance. They had doubled their student load from the spring to the fall semester and not increased instructors at all and there were several more issues as well. Taking the time to evaluate your school is one of the first things that I go over with people looking to start training because it can completely change your experience. It took me 9 months to get my instrument rating almost entirely because of availability.
The best part of the E2A experience for me was getting involved with RTAG and getting to give back and share my experience with the next generation of E2A coming behind me. I worked the check in desk at the RTAG Convention in 2022 and I was blown away at how many people knew my name from my posts and had questions for me, most of whom I’d never met before. I share what information I can when I feel like I can be of help, and I reached more people than I realized. This community is a lot tighter than I knew before. Even with over 4,000 convention attendees it felt like a close group at times in that huge space.
This career has as much to do with timing as it does with drive and determination. I would love to say that I got to where I am as quickly as I did just because I am that good, but ultimately that isn’t true. It had as much to do with luck of timing as it did with anything else. Hiring hit unheard of highs in 2021-2022. I have heard so much frustration from people in the last year about hiring trends. Many seem to think that they are behind the curve by not being hired at their dream airline at 2000 hours. This industry is cyclical and the hiring today is far more in line with historical highs than anything in 2021-2022. That surge of hiring, and people like me getting hired to a regional at 989 hours with no ATP, then to a major at 1378 and a restricted ATP was anomalous and will likely not happen again in the next several decades. But that doesn’t mean that hope is lost. Many major airlines are growing rapidly with no plans to slow down, or have yet to hit peak retirements, which won’t top out until 2026 and won’t truly taper off until after 2033. And we are still waiting for manufacturers to be back to full production as well, which is really throttling a lot of hiring. The path will be longer than so many of the people that inspired you in recent years, but you’ll still get there. Keep on flying and keep on building that resume. I have always used a phrase common in the special operations communities “Don’t self select”: make them tell you no, never decide for them that you aren’t good enough. I only got my interview at a major airline because I applied and went to a Meet & Greet before I met minimums, then bugged a recruiter at RTAG in 2023 when they just happened to announce they were lowering their minimums and I now qualified. Sooner or later you’ll meet minimums, you just have to keep working toward them.