Agree, and I have done both jobs. The airline training and pilot background was far more intense and did indeed require a lot of OTJ experience to begin (1500 hours) and the wages are substandard, ludicrous by comparison with other similar professions. Engineering entailed a (very) long haul to finish school, and it was rigorous coursework that included a lot of overnight work to finish, massive loans and so on, but there was zero <0> on OTJ experience required to start a job at $50 to $60k.

Boiler, you make lots of great points on these boards but this is not among them. Strong links can be shown between poverty, lack of sleep, poor nutrition and low academic achievement in school children. Poverty among airline pilots most certainly seems to bear the same linkage. Congress decided as much when they made the current Colgan 3407-driven rule changes. The basic idea is if getting by takes up all your time and energy, that energy is gone and cannot be expended somewhere else (ie. flying safely).

I am among those who think the markets have failed to insure adequate salaries for entry- level airline pilots. When the market fails, regulation must take over. If we have airplanes falling out of the sky and the cause is linked to low wages and fatigue (and they have been linked in multiple places), then something is wrong with market wage and the system should be fixed. Congress stepped in and mandated new rules to fix the problem, we'll see how effective that is, but the cause still remains pretty clear- low wages.