Originally Posted by rickair7777

You'll be fine, and your timing with the state of the industry could not be better. Employment opportunities are on track to be historically unprecedented over the next 10-15 years, based solely on mandatory age 65 retirements, not even considering economic growth.

The flip side is that while the outlook has never been better, it's still the airline industry which has been historically cyclical and full of unpleasant surprises so you never know what will happen. But there should still be enough retirements to minimize the impact on your career of a run-of-the-mill economic slowdown, or an increase in retirement age to 67. Age 67 could happen, but it won't go much beyond that, at some point civil liberty idealism will crash on the metaphorical rocks of biology (hopefully before an airplane crashes on real rocks).

That said...there's a lot of info here on APC about career changing, most folks doing it are older than you, some are much, much older although they have different career expectations than you do.

1. Unlike fields like lawyer or accountant, you can "try out" aviation before you make the career jump and investment. Go get a PPL, then fly around for fun for a while (100 hours?) and see how you like it.

2. Regionals will hire you without a degree in a heartbeat. But you will need a four-year degree to move on to the majors (there are very rare exceptions but odds are that they won't be you). How to get it? Depends on your finances and family situation...

- Aviation university. Expensive but you get the degree and training done together, plus you get an exception to the 1500 hour rule such that you can hold an R-ATP (Restricted Airline Transport Pilot certificate) and get an airline job with only 1000 hours. Obvious downside is cost and years of school.

- Traditional flight school: You could go sign up now and start your ratings, and train at your own pace. Self-paced could allow you to train as your schedule and finances allow, and also to keep your welding gig going. You'll want to research part 91 vs. part 141 flight training (you would probably want part 61 unless you have military GI Bill bennies). You could finish ratings and probably work as instructor for that school to get your 1500 hours to get hired by a regional. You could work on the degree via distance learning while employed at a regional...you'll have a few years before you have enough airline experience to compete for a major job any way. The hard part here is being disciplined enough to work on the degree between the job and family.

To be a good candidate for majors, you'll want no significant criminal convictions, minimal traffic tickets (if you have some don't get any more), and a very high checkride success rate. Checkride failures do happen but you do not want to have more than one if at all possible, failures in general aviation flight training are more understandable because you're new to aviation at that point and the system is not very consistent. Try not to fail any airline checkrides, avoid airlines which have notoriously bad pass rates for noobs. Also younger people today have been stumbling with social media...I'm guessing at age 28 with wife, kids, and business you don't have a lot of stoopid stuff out there on facebook but you might want to clean that up and lock it down now if needed. Majors will look at that and will not hire you if they find social media evidence of outrageous behavior or fringe social/political views. If your friends are neo-nazis or ethnic agitators, better disconnect from that online now.

Seniority is everything, and it's moving fast right now so if you're going to do it, get started.