Originally Posted by 1Seat 1Engine

For those of you who want to debunk these numbers with anecdotal stories of, "I once knew a CFI who had to live off of dog food, therfor these numbers can't be right" etc: I would trust the BLS's methodology a little more than the anecdotal method.

In fact, if you look around on their website you can find a lot more about what they think and they seem pretty smart on the subject. The BLS mentions several times that there are wide disparities between what pilots are paid for smaller airplanes and what senior pilots are paid for larger airplanes. Their numbers also include flight engineers, who aren't notoriously well paid. They repeatedly say that senior pilots for large airlines are "among the highest paid workers in America."

Since 50% of values fall below and above the median, even if you were paid ZERO for flying, we know that the potential income of Captains for UPS/FedEx/most legacies and even SWA is well upwards of $300. So the max is value is somewhere between two and three times the median in this case.

Think of it this way: If you plot the values on a graph (income on the bottom or x axis and number of pilots paid that income on the left or y axis), the area contained underneath the plot must be equal both left and right of the median. The left edge of the graph can't go below zero but the right edge can go up to $400k or whatever the best paid pilot in the US made. The fact that the right edge of the plot can tail off into very high numbers (3x the median) guarantees that the mean would be higher than the median.

Consider that you could conceivably take the top 5 paid airline pilots, triple their pay and ONLY THE MEAN would increase, the median value would remain the same.

The bottom line is, I believe their median numbers are correct and I believe the mean would be greater than the median.

And no I didn't sleep in a holiday in express but I do have a degree in Accounting.

And some of you guys should drag out your community college stats textbooks before you start issuing guarantees or asking what world we're in.