Originally Posted by
jetset
I suggest planning on being at your regional for 10-20 years. Keep trying to get hired and if you get on with a major before the 10-20 year mark you will be pleasantly surprised.
Plenty of pilots get hired with a bust or two without a masters or aviation degree. And a pilot with 5k TT and 2k TPIC is barely marketable no matter what you have been hearing. Also an aviation degree isn't going to make a pilot more marketable vs a non-aviation degree.
Don't give up, embrace the suck and keep updating. It could take decades or it could take 6 months. No way to know at this point!
You could always jump ship for Frontier or Spirit or Allegiant and then try to move on from there vs your regional. Be careful though, you may just like it being an airbus captain making six figures and give up on the legacies all together. In which case that is good too
This is horrible advice. Figure out your career earning potential with a move to an LCC or good corporate job vs staying put, and tack getting hired at a major a few years from now onto the end of that. Major or no, your retirement/savings would probably look better in 30 years if you move on. The only situation in which it wouldn't is if you stay put and get picked up in the next two-ish years, but there's no guarantee in that. Nobody I know is getting hired with 5,000 TT and 2,000 TPIC; they're getting hired with LESS. Are you volunteering, networking, going to career fairs, polishing your app and being an all around interesting person? Are these 5000-hour captains you fly with who don't get called doing that? It doesn't matter if you're a good pilot, they want to see all that other stuff. Sad but true. Your decision should be a based on QOL and income, and who says you can't go to Delta if they call you on your first day of IOE at JetBlue?