The aviation industry is littered with acronyms. I am actually struggling right now to increase my internal glossary to be able to parse all of these three and four letter words.

A commercial pilot is not one that fly’s for the big air carriers – those are known as Airline Transport Pilots and they are a totally different class (and license). From what I understand, commercial pilots receive their ATP license after training with the respective air carrier they are going to work with.

A commercial pilot is one that can get paid for flying. All of the other licenses below are not allowed to get paid for flying an airplane.