In shortAccording to Andrei Borisevich, founder of a flight school in Miami, the full program up to flight instructor costs $79,990 and takes about a year, followed by two more years of instructing to build the hours an airline requires. For a foreigner, the most realistic route is the M-1 student visa, valid for up to three years: a work visa for pilots, he says, is almost impossible to get. The figures were given in March 2024.
Forty letters to forty Russian airlines. Three replies. Two of them said, "You have no training." The third said, "You have no experience." Andrei Borisevich, a programmer from Minsk, received them in 2005, sat with them for a while and understood something simple: nobody would give him experience until someone hired him, but training was something he could go and get.
I got three replies. Two said I had no training, and one said I had no experience.Watch this moment · 5:17
Today Andrei runs his own flight school in Miami. The question I brought to his hangar is one that anyone who has moved to America and once dreamed of the sky will recognize: how much does it cost, how many years does it take, and will they let a foreigner into the cockpit? We recorded our conversation between a Cessna business jet and a Robinson R44 helicopter. I'm writing this column from an episode recorded in March 2024, so please read the prices and rules with that date in mind.
How much does it cost to become a pilot in the US?
I asked the way dreamers ask: I want to be the best Boeing pilot there is — how much money do I need? Andrei's answer: the Airline Pilot Program costs $79,990. "The way Americans like it," he laughs. He dropped the cents, he says, "so it's not completely embarrassing."
That's the entire path up to flight instructor, not just one year of lessons. When people write to the school asking how much a private pilot license costs, he answers separately: about $14,000.
No, that's the full course. We'll take you all the way to instructor.Watch this moment · 24:58
How many years from the first lesson to a Boeing cockpit?
In Andrei's math, it all takes three years: one year of training, then two years working as an instructor and logging hours, and only then can you apply to fly a Boeing for an airline. Everything comes down to flight time. Three hundred hours in a year is about an hour a day, and Andrei calls that schedule "perfectly realistic, even easygoing." Faster than four months is unlikely, he says, and the record-holders he has seen finished the program in five.
ProStudio1Look at it this way: one year you study, two years you work as an instructor.Watch this moment · 25:32
He had a living example close at hand. In 2019, his friend Yegor, who was 33 or 34 at the time, walked away from his job and decided to become a pilot. Andrei was sure that within a month he'd be back to his BMWs. Instead, Yegor showed up at the school at nine every morning and left at five, as if it were an office job, and finished the whole program in six months. A year later he had about 600 flight hours. In three years he logged 3,500 hours, while the typical path, according to Andrei, gets you about 1,500. He was hired by a cargo airline to fly the largest cargo aircraft there is.
As I listened, I thought about everyone over thirty who believes the train has already left the station. Yegor was exactly that age.
How much do pilots earn in the US?
Andrei made it clear up front that he wouldn't name Yegor's exact salary, but he gave the order of magnitude. A first officer, the pilot in the right-hand seat, makes around $10,000–11,000 a month in the first year and $12,000–13,000 in the second, and the pay keeps rising from there. Once a first officer becomes a captain, the salary "goes past 20,000 a month." At Southwest, he says, a pilot with twelve or more years of experience earns about $400,000 a year.
There's a flip side. Aviation moves in waves: in a downturn pilots lose their jobs, and then airlines line up to hire them again. At the time of our recording, Andrei said, the industry was in a shortage phase, and airlines were renegotiating contracts upward. What the market will look like now, he didn't promise.
ProStudio1I think a first officer at Yegor's level makes somewhere around 10–11 thousand a month in his first year.Watch this moment · 29:46
Can a foreigner become a pilot in the US, and which visa do you need?
This is where Andrei was most careful. If you don't have a visa, the school offers the M-1 student visa: it lets you stay in the US for up to three years and doesn't allow you to work, but after your training it permits practical training for a period equal to a quarter of your study time. If you already have an American visa, his advice is not to touch it, "just so you don't break the one you have."
There's one warning he always repeats. A work visa for the profession of pilot is extremely hard to get, because Congress doesn't want foreigners in this industry. According to him, the people flying for American airlines are those who already have a green card.
Getting a work visa as a pilot in America today is practically impossible.Watch this moment · 36:44
I'm an immigrant myself, and I know how easy it is to mistake someone else's story for your own. So I'm not presenting these rules as law: immigration regulations change, and questions about visas belong with an immigration attorney.
What it takes to become a pilot: character, health, age
ProStudio1I asked the first question point-blank, and Andrei answered within seconds. Discipline. The desire and the ability to keep learning, endlessly. And the ability to do the same thing every single day — he means a good airline pilot here, not a test pilot.
Because a real pilot never stops learning, never stops his education.Watch this moment · 1:23
He calls the medical certificate a "bread card": it's what gives you the right to fly and earn your living. The exam takes twenty or thirty minutes, he says; after forty the checkups become more frequent and an EKG is added. You can start training as early as twelve, according to him, and he didn't name an upper age limit. The gym isn't required for the job, but long hours in a seat and coffee in the cockpit take their toll, so Andrei recommends at least some Pilates.
How not to lose money on your first flight school
ProStudio1I listened to this part especially closely, because Andrei's school grew out of his own mistake. In 2013 he came to the US to earn an American license. One instructor disappeared; a second taught him for two weeks and vanished too. The third, the school's owner, called from Costa Rica: something had happened to his mother, so he was handing Andrei over to a young instructor with 200 flight hours — while Andrei himself already had 500.
At the checkride he learned what nobody had warned him about. After fifteen questions, the examiner told him: your English is very poor, you don't understand half the questions, and you don't know the answers to the other half. By then, Andrei says, he had spent about $40,000, was living in a hotel, and every day cost him roughly $100. Then, just before New Year's, his flight bag was stolen from his home with his logbooks inside, including two Russian ones — the record of his entire flying history.
If I had done proper, sensible research, I might have found a school of a different level.Watch this moment · 13:40
From this story I'd take three questions to ask any school: who prepares you for the exam and what will they ask, how can you test your English beforehand, and how quickly does the school answer an email. On that last point Andrei has a rule: a reply within 24 hours. In his experience, nine schools out of ten never answer a beginner at all.
What I'm taking away from this conversation
ProStudio1Andrei never did walk into Aeroflot, Russia's largest airline, with his American license: by 2014, he says, it wasn't hiring anyone. Instead he built a school, and for the ninth year in a row he answers beginners' emails. I left the hangar that day with one thought: here, "too late" isn't measured in years. It's measured in flight hours.
Watch the full conversation, in Russian, on the Without Borders YouTube channel, and tell me in the comments what you dreamed of as a child. Prices and timelines were given in March 2024, and training and visa rules change: for visa questions, talk to an immigration attorney; for training questions, talk to a flight school.
Kristina Samofal
Photo & Video Production