Originally Posted by
bgmann
Don't look at the graph. Read the comment about $20,000 salary. Will take quite a few years to break $35k, unless your lucky. The nice salary is >10 years away from where you're at right now. I suppose it's possible to get on with someone like Skywest an upgrade quicker than Envoy and start making $72,000+. But don't be blinded by six-digit "stats". You'll be disappointed.
Good point, and one I find intriguing. I always doubted the medians were very useful from USBLS webpages. It shows that lumping regional and major airline pay in one big number is not a wise thing, because a median pay figure does not insure that you will (or are likely to) make that much money yourself. The odds are against it.
To make an illustration- a 1,000 guys in group A make $20k while another group of the same size (B) make $200k. The median (what US BLS reports) is $100k. But how many people in either group in this example actually make $100k? None. You are only going to make max $20k working in group A (ie. a regional airline) and not a penny more. All that money made by persons in group B (hypothetical majors)
has zero effect on the actual wages you'll actually get if you happen to be in group A, which is not what the USBLS data seems to suggest.
That's a hypothetical example but you get the idea that lumping disparate groups together skews the median and makes the real wages less accurate depending on how far apart the subgroups are. For that matter lumping the pay of captains with first officers within one broad group is misleading. The groups need to be fairly similar for median to be accurate. What we need is a breakdown of the data by the various groups. Looking at
those medians would be revealing. The data is there to be had, one could even derive it from the front pages of APC using a few assumptions.