Where are you flying these days? Buddy of mine (PPL, lots of hours) is talking about becoming a missionary in Africa and flying there, has me doing his Comm/Inst right now. Any advice for the young lad?
I got a job flying in the northern portion of South America, flying into the Amazon forest...doing the license conversion now and training in OCT-NOV....
Well if your friend will be done by the end of the year, it may be a very good timing, not so much for missionary work but for most fo the rest of the flying as this is the low season and when usually they start getting pilots and train them. In most of Africa they requie you to hold a "type rating" even on a C206, and most company like to hire pilots that have like a check out flight on one in their logbooks, usually you need 5 hours in a single and 10 for a twin, I only had 1 hour (it was a BFR) in a C206 when i got the job and CAA didn`t care and they gave me the type on the license validation. Other then this you really need to go over there and knock at doors, his best bet is Maun Botswana or Swakopmund/Windhoek in Namibia, but Daer el Salam may be good too if he has a bit more TT then the average fresh CPL.
Kenya may be soon a good option too, they are running out of bush pilots over there, the airlines grew a lot and they mopped up most of the good pilots that where flying in the bush, the govt is trying to get the companies to hire one of the many licensed but useless CPL holder that just sit around, but since they don`t meet the standards they don`t get hired, several companies are facing a shortage this next season and are working hard with the govt to ease down on thir foreign pilots policy...I know of some companies that where already looking for foreign pilots knowing this, this Italian owned safari camp has it`s own strip and C206 that they use to transfer guest from Nairobi
http://www.maasai.com/ the owner was looking some time ago for a chief pilot to run his C206...
As far as the South Pacific goes it`s a question of luck, not as many jobs over there, you really just need to keep calling the companies.
Missionary work is really hard to get, you have to be involved in it already back in the US, and in most cases you need to be part of their Church, that said I don`t know that much on how to get hired, I was never interested as I don`t fully agree with some of their work..
Alex