Privileges and limitations

The regulation grants two distinct privileges, and the difference between them matters more than it looks. The first is the privilege to act as pilot in command of an aircraft that is carrying persons or property for compensation or hire. The second is the privilege to act as pilot in command of an aircraft for compensation or hire, with no requirement that the aircraft be carrying anything payable at all.

The second privilege is broader and far more common in practice. It covers the ferry pilot, the corporate pilot, the powerline patrol pilot, the skydiving jump pilot. The customer supplies the airplane and buys a piloting service. The operation stays under Part 91, and a commercial pilot operates there without any additional certificate.

The first privilege puts the pilot in direct contact with public transportation. The moment passengers or cargo are carried for pay, the question becomes who supplies the airplane, who decides the destination, and whether that service is offered to the public. Depending on the answers, the operation falls under Part 91, Part 135, or Part 121.

A candidate who earns the commercial certificate in the airplane category and class without also holding an instrument rating in the same category and class is issued a certificate carrying an explicit limitation: carrying passengers for hire on cross-country flights of more than 50 nautical miles, or carrying passengers for hire at night, is prohibited.

This limitation is not a formality. It removes a large part of the certificate's economic value, since it excludes exactly the flights a paying customer wants: long trips and night trips. It applies only to carrying passengers for compensation, though. It does not prevent ferry flying, flight instruction, or aerial work.

The limitation is lifted the moment the pilot earns the instrument rating in the same category and class. That is a mechanical event: as soon as the rating is added, the restriction disappears from the certificate's privileges. Many training plans place the instrument rating before the commercial for exactly this reason, and because instrument training hours can often be logged toward both certificates at once.

The question that decides whether an operation falls under Part 135 is not the amount paid, the distance flown, or the number of passengers aboard. It is the legal concept of common carriage, which the FAA defines by four elements that must all be present together: an offer made to the public, the carriage of persons or property, from one point to another, for compensation.

All four have to be present at once. Remove the public offer and the operation is no longer common carriage; it becomes private carriage instead. Remove the movement from one point to another and the operation falls outside common carriage too, which is why sightseeing flights that return to the point of departure are handled under a separate rule. Remove the compensation and there is no question left to ask.

In practice, the fact that decides the case most often is who supplies the airplane and who supplies the pilot. If the customer buys a ticket and the operator supplies everything, that is common carriage. If the customer already owns or leases the airplane and buys only a piloting service, the operation stays under Part 91 and a commercial pilot can be paid to fly it.

A commercial pilot who posts an online ad offering to fly passengers anywhere they want in the pilot's own airplane, in exchange for a cost-shared payment above actual fuel and rental costs, checks all four boxes of common carriage without realizing it. That scenario is the textbook case behind FAA enforcement actions.

Part 119 lists the operations that, although compensated, do not require an air carrier or commercial operator certificate. This list is where most of the jobs actually open to a newly certificated commercial pilot are found, and it is worth knowing precisely.

It includes flight instruction, ferry and training flights, and the entire category of aerial work: agricultural application, banner towing, aerial photography and survey, firefighting support, powerline and pipeline patrol, and parachute jump operations. What all of these share is that none of them consists of carrying a customer from one point to another.

Nonstop sightseeing flights are a special case with their own authorization regime. They take off and land at the same airport and stay within a limited operating area, subject to their own experience and safety-manual conditions.

For a pilot building flight time, the practical consequence is clear: the first paying jobs are found almost entirely in instruction and aerial work, essentially never in carrying passengers.

Issuance of a flight instructor certificate requires holding at least a commercial certificate in the matching category and class. The commercial certificate is therefore not only a license to be paid; it is the mandatory prerequisite for the most heavily traveled professional path in US aviation.

This chaining explains the classic shape of an American training plan: private, then instrument rating, then commercial, then flight instructor. Each stage feeds the next, and instructing becomes the tool for building the flight hours required by the higher-time jobs that lie beyond it.

It is worth remembering that instructing is a genuinely different job from flying transport. The skills tested are not the same, and the flight instructor practical test weighs teaching ability as heavily as flying.

Private carriage is the mirror image of common carriage, and it is the regime under which most commercial pilots earn their first paychecks without ever touching Part 135. A private carriage arrangement involves a specific, individually negotiated agreement with one customer or a small closed group, not an open offer to the public.

A corporate flight department flying its own executives, a rancher hiring a commercial pilot to fly the ranch's own airplane, and a ferry flight for a specific owner are all private carriage: the airplane belongs to (or is controlled by) the customer, the arrangement is not advertised to the public at large, and the pilot is simply selling piloting skill.

The distinction is not always obvious in a gray area, and the FAA has published guidance to help sort real cases: Advisory Circular 120-12A works through the holding-out test and the operational-control test in detail, with examples. A pilot planning to fly for money outside of an established Part 135 operator should read it before, not after, taking the job.