this might be a weird question but im genuinely curious. i see people online claiming they went from weekend flier to full time commercial pilot and im never sure if those stories are real or if its just someone trying to sell a course. like did anyone here actually make that jump and if so what did it look like in practice.

im not necessarily trying to go full time myself, i have a decent job, but the idea of eventually doing something in the industry more seriously is in the back of my head. right now im just flying on weekends doing my own photography stuff and i got my 107 earlier this year. i do a lot of landscape stuff and some of it is genuinely good i think but i have no idea how you go from that to like, paid work without it feeling weird or pushy to approach people about it.

anyway just curious if anyone has a real story to share, not a success myth kind of thing, like the actual messy version of how it happened

yeah i did it, kind of. went from hobbyist to doing it about 70% of my income over maybe three years. but its not a clean story at all - i had a bunch of failed attempts at different niches before i found construction and infrastructure which honestly nobody talks about but pays way better than real estate shoots. the first year i probably made like 4000 dollars total from drone work which is embarassing to even type but i kept at it and started targeting general contractors and project managers instead of trying to compete on the real estate thing.

the landscape and artistic photography stuff is genuinely hard to monetize unless you go the stock footage route or build a social following, which is its own full time job basically. the boring industrial stuff is where the actual money tends to be in my experience. not glamorous but the clients are serious and they pay.

the course seller thing is such a good point lol. i've seen so many of those guys and you dig into it and their actual drone income is mostly from selling the course about drone income. not all of them but enough that i'm pretty skeptical now whenever someone has a very polished story about it.

real talk though i know a guy locally who does mapping and surveying contracted through a civil engineering firm and he's legitimately busy year round. that end of the industry seems more stable than the media side. requires different software skills though, more like learning pix4d or similar stuff than just being good at flying and editing.