Originally Posted by JungleBus

Yikes, so many questions, where do I start .

Long story short, I've had an aviation blog since 2005. Have been a subscriber to Flying since I was 13 (1994). Current Editor-in-Chief of Flying reads my blog, liked what he read, & asked me to write for them. I started doing a straight day-in-the-life piece and it bored me to tears, and the average non-airline pilot, having no context of the regional industry, would be hard-pressed to understand how it's any different from a day in the life of a major airline pilot. I could have gone the eight-leg-day route but that's quickly becoming obsolete in the regional world. I chose to use a day that would have been performed by a mainline pilot <10 years ago, now done at RJ wages, largely by pilots who have already been furloughed & reset to year one wages at least once. That seems to be the way the regional world has been going, and not much of the general public or even GA world is aware of it. It was never going to be a "woe is me, I'm so overworked and underpaid" piece because neither Flying's editorial staff nor their readership is very interested in that sort of thing. It was an honest look at the ups and downs of the industry as I've seen them, and I felt fortunate to be afforded that honesty with very little editorial input. Keep in mind that much of Flying's advertising revenue comes from the flight training industry.

"flying more smoothly than I am able" = a bit of artistic license, a bit of wry self-effacement, and a bit of the truth. The vast majority of airline pilots these days leave the autopilot on for 95% of the flight. In reality I take pride in hand-flying smoothly, accurately, and for a decent portion of climb & approach, but I recognize that the autopilot usually does as good of a job and it's not what I'm paid for. I'm paid for my experience & judgement.

When writing it the two things I kept in mind were 1) will the average GA pilot understand this and find it interesting? and 2) will this ring true to my fellow regional pilots? The article has already garnered positive reaction from Flying's readership; hopefully most of the regional guys who read it understand where I'm coming from better than a few of the posters here.