You can have 5,000 flight hours and still not get the call.
Every week, qualified pilots and maintenance leaders get passed over. Not because they lack experience, but because their resume doesn’t show it.
At API, we’ve spent 55 years placing pilots, maintenance professionals, schedulers/dispatchers and aviation leaders in Part 91 flight departments across the country. As aviation recruiters, we read resumes every day—and we can tell within six seconds whether one will move forward. An applicant tracking system (ATS) takes even less time to reject a file outright.
Whether you’re actively looking or just open to the right opportunity, your resume should be ready before the call comes. Here’s a practical guide to what goes in, how to format it and why it matters.
Start With What You Deliver, Not What You Were Hired to Do
The hiring manager is not reading your logbook, they’re reading your resume. Those are two very different documents.
The most common resume mistake in business aviation—or any industry—is writing a list of duties.
Duties describe a job description, not a person.
A chief pilot who writes “responsible for flight operations and crew scheduling” has told a hiring manager almost nothing.
That phrase fits a dozen candidates.
The one who gets the interview writes something closer to this: “Directed all flight operations for a three-aircraft, eight-pilot Part 91 department supporting 600-plus annual flight hours across North America and Europe, maintaining 98% on-time departure performance over four years.”
That sentence answers the questions every corporate aviation hiring manager actually has.
How big was the operation? What did on-time performance look like? How long did you sustain it?
Specifics don’t just fill space; they build credibility.
The same principle applies to maintenance. “Performed scheduled maintenance on company aircraft” describes a task.
This describes a result: “Managed annual inspection cycle for a Gulfstream G550 and two Phenom 300s, completing all scheduled maintenance on time and 11% under the prior year’s budget.”
One of those sentences will get you a call back.
Numbers Are Your Most Persuasive Tool
No matter your role, metrics matter. Focus on what’s important to the enterprise: departure reliability, aircraft availability, cost management and safety record.
If your work touches any of those—and it likely does—quantify it. A range or an approximation is more useful than a vague claim. Even a rough number is better than none.
The examples below show the difference between a bullet that describes a duty and one that demonstrates a result.
Pilot Quantification Statements
| Weak: “Flew international trips for executive principals.” | Strong: “Operated G650 on North Atlantic and Pacific oceanic routes for Fortune 500 principals, logging 340-plus international hours annually with zero RVSM deviations over five years.” |
| Weak: “Conducted CRM training for flight department.” | Strong: “Developed and delivered annual CRM recurrent curriculum for six-pilot department, reducing incident report frequency by 40% over three years.” |
| Weak: “Helped develop company safety program.” | Strong: “Co-authored safety management system (SMS) that achieved IS-BAO Stage 1 registration 10 months ahead of the department’s target date.” |
Maintenance Quantification Statements
| Weak: “Responsible for maintenance on company aircraft.” | Strong: “Maintained 99.2% aircraft reliability across a two-Challenger, one-Citation Part 91 fleet over three years, averaging fewer than three missed or delayed flight legs annually.” |
| Weak: “Managed parts and vendor relationships.” | Strong: “Consolidated parts sourcing to two preferred vendors, cutting average AOG resolution time from 31 hours to 14 hours.” |
| Weak: “Oversaw inspection program.” | Strong: “Renegotiated engine maintenance program contract, reducing annual cost by $84,000 while expanding coverage to include on-wing inspections.” |
Your Summary Section Does the Work Your Logbook Cannot
The summary at the top of your resume is where most Part 91 professionals leave points on the table. Many skip it entirely, while others write an objective statement: “Seeking a challenging position in corporate aviation.”
This tells the reader nothing useful and signals an outdated approach to job searching.
Instead, write three to four sentences in the third person. State your certificate or credential, the operational context you come from, the aircraft or fleet you know best and one distinguishing qualification.
The goal is to give a recruiter—or the HR generalist who has never seen a Part 91 operation—enough context to understand why you’re worth a conversation.
| Sample summary: Part 91 Captain ATP-certificated captain with 11,800 total hours, including 3,900 hours pilot-in-command in the Gulfstream G550. Twelve years in a single-aircraft Fortune 500 corporate flight department operating under FAR Part 91, with extensive North Atlantic and European experience. Current on RVSM, MNPS and oceanic procedures. IS-BAO Stage 2 accreditation participant; CRM facilitator-qualified. | Sample summary: Director of Maintenance FAA Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) mechanic and Inspection Authorization (IA) holder with 18 years in Part 91 corporate flight departments. Currently managing a three-aircraft Bombardier fleet for a privately held company, overseeing all scheduled and unscheduled maintenance, vendor relationships and a $1.4 million annual maintenance budget. No missed trips due to maintenance in four years of current assignment. |
Write for Two Readers: The Algorithm and the Human
Before your resume reaches a hiring manager, it passes through an applicant tracking system. It’s a software that parses your document, looks for keywords and scores your fit against the job description.
Most applicants are screened by the same systems that process accountants and marketing managers. The software doesn’t know what an ATP is unless your resume tells it.
To get through the system, be sure to spell out every acronym on first use and place the abbreviated form immediately after it in parentheses. You’ll satisfy the ATS keyword requirement and provide the non-aviation HR reader enough context to pass your file forward.
That habit alone can improve your callback rate.
Following are examples to showcase acronyms on first usage:
| Instead of: ATP, RVSM, MNPS, PIC 9,400 hours | Write: Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) certificate, 9,400 flight hours as pilot-in-command (PIC), qualified for Reduced Vertical Separation Minimum (RVSM) and Minimum Navigation Performance Specification (MNPS) airspace |
| Instead of: A&P/IA, Part 145 experience, CAMP administrator | Write: FAA Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) certificate with Inspection Authorization (IA); experience in Part 145 certificated repair station operations; administrator for Continuous Airworthiness Maintenance Program (CAMP) tracking system. |
Format for the Machine First, the Human Second
A beautifully designed resume is worthless if the software can’t read it. Multi-column layouts, text boxes, graphics and tables used as structural frames all create parsing problems. The ATS strips your formatting and reads raw text. Content stored in a sidebar or graphic is frequently lost entirely.
Use a clean, single-column document with standard fonts (e.g., Arial, Calibri or Georgia) at 10 to 12 points with margins between three-quarters and one inch. Use conventional section labels: Summary, Experience, Certifications, Education. Nothing fancy because fancy gets filtered out.
Submit a .docx file unless the application specifically requires a PDF. Word documents parse more reliably across the major platforms. If you must submit a PDF, open it, select all and confirm the text is selectable. A scanned PDF is invisible to the software.
The Credentials Section Is Not an Afterthought
For pilots: List your flight hours and highest certificate first, then all ratings in full, then type ratings with the complete aircraft designation, including time in type and PIC time, and then your medical class and currency date.
For maintenance professionals: List your A&P certificate and your IA if you hold one. Follow it with manufacturer-specific airframe, powerplant and avionics training by aircraft type and year. Two certifications increasingly valued in corporate hiring are the ASTM NCATT Aircraft Electronics Technician (AET), which demonstrates avionics and electronics competency, and the Satcom Direct Aero IT certification, which covers the connectivity systems now central to both cabin operations and flight deck communications. Either one on a resume stands out.
Both groups: Include the year of every training completion — recency matters, and hiring managers notice when dates are missing. If the job posting mentions a specific aircraft, make your hours or hands-on experience in that type immediately visible. Burying “G550, 2,200 hours” in a dense paragraph is the resume equivalent of keeping your most relevant credential in your back pocket.
Here’s the Part Most People Skip
Read each job description carefully and tailor your resume accordingly. Note every qualification and aircraft type mentioned, then confirm your resume addresses each one using the same language the posting uses. This takes 15 minutes and most applicants skip it. The ones who do it are the ones who get called.
You built the career—now write the resume that proves it.
Your Next Role May Not Be Posted Anywhere
The flight departments worth working for don’t advertise. They call API.
If you’re not looking today but would move for the right opportunity, becoming an API Registered Professional is how you make sure we know who you are before that call comes in. Pilots, maintenance professionals, dispatchers and aviation leaders at the director and VP level—we place them all, and our clients trust us exclusively to do it.
There’s no cost and no obligation. Just your career, taken seriously. Sign up today.