been doing this part time for almost two years, mostly real estate and the occasional event here and there. i make decent side money but every time i think about going full time i get scared off. the work is so inconsistent — like i had three great months in a row and then basically nothing for six weeks and i had to dip into savings.

talked to a guy at a fly-in last spring who said he went full time and regretted it, said the market got too crowded with guys charging almost nothing because they just got their 107 and want flying to pay for their hobby. i dont know if thats true everywhere or just his area. curious what people here think, is this a real career path or more of a good side hustle ceiling kind of thing

the guy you talked to is kind of right but also kind of wrong if that makes sense. yeah theres a ton of people undercutting on real estate especially, but theres a whole tier of commercial work — cell tower inspections, powerline surveys, lidar mapping, that kind of stuff — where the barrier to entry is actually high enough that the race to the bottom doesnt really happen. those jobs need specific sensors, specific certifications sometimes, and clients who want cheap usually cant even evaluate whether you did it right anyway so they go with whoever seems legit.

i went full time three years ago and the first year was rough but now its fine. i diversified into training and consulting alongside the actual flight work which smoothed out the income a lot. if youre relying purely on shooting pretty photos from the sky it is genuinely harder to sustain than it was even four years ago.

six weeks dry spell isnt that unusual in this industry from what i can tell, even the guys who seem super established have slow periods. but i think the real question is whether you have enough of a niche or if youre just kind of doing whatever comes in. i noticed my bookings got way more consistent when i stopped trying to do everything and just leaned hard into agricultural stuff in my region, theres not many people doing it locally and the farmers actually have real budgets unlike some of the real estate clients who want to pay $75 for a full shoot lmao