I actually worked out a comparison of what how long it would take to equal the pay at a typical office job if you went into flying for a regional airline (I picked ASA) as of tomorrow. I do not have my spreadsheet with me, but in column A there was a starting salary of $48k which increased by cost of living (3%) every year for a series of years. In column B I put starting FO pay at ASA flying the CRJ, followed by another two years of that with corresponding pay raises, and in the third year our hypothesis includes we make captain of CRJ and continue for another few years. My calculation found that after the seventh year at ASA one would just about break even over a desk job. He/she would make more flying the jet from then on.

Now you could say well after 7 years at a desk job you could jump into an entry management position, and be at a much higher salary. This is only true if you happen to have a masters and they need a manager. And the comparison does not include flight training costs which are substantial, and it does not account for what happens if you do not upgrade very fast for some reason, or if the airline goes out of business which I think is a risk more commonly associated with airlines than desk jobs.

My conclusion was unless you like flying a lot you would do better playing the corporate/desk game. You can get raises better than just cost of living in all likelihood, and many desk jobs offer bonuses on top of normal raises for hard work. But you would have to like doing that a lot, toiling endlessly in a cubicle, and be willing to get a masters while working the job which could be pretty taxing. In the end, you would have a better life going that way and I think most people would agree, especially the family people.

What's hard to put a number on, is how good getting to fly every day is. I wanted to do this from about the age of 17 and never had chance. I would be willing to try regional airline life for a while just to get it out of my system. If I liked it, I may be able to do alright paywise. But I would have to decide that giving it a try was the only way I thought I would be happy with myself, something I would not really ask if I only engineered airplanes which is what I presently do.

My father is long since retired, and he said to me once that he thinks he had a deep need for adventure that he never recognized during his working years, and that it made him restless during his career. He thought if he had addressed the restlessness as an innate need in and of itself, he would have made better choices in life.