Originally Posted by
GuardPolice
I hesitate to even point this out but I’m surprised no one has yet.
Didn’t you leave only a regional airline career? You’re assuming you would have been hired by a major. I’m not suggesting you wouldn’t have made it to a major, but there are thousands of pilots who have a flying resume similar to yours that can’t get a call to make it to the next level. With that said, I guess writing these articles with a career's worth of regional wages isn’t as sexy as mainline career wages.
IMHO, you were a victim of bad timing entering our profession. That coupled with a potential spouse unwilling to accept the lifestyle our profession requires made for a rough time for you. You have my empathy; however, you’re not the first and certainly won’t be the last to go through these challenges.
Best of luck to you.
That's a really great point, and one that I worked to address in my first article:
"We are assuming that everyone who signs up for $200K in loans is a successful major airline pilot. In reality, many aspiring pilots struggle to get started with their first flight job, lose their medical certificate, become disenchanted with the lifestyle, get stuck in lower paying flight jobs, fail out of training, or otherwise don’t make it to the highest-paying echelon."
As we all know in finance, past performance is no indication of future results. What I did was take my college buddy's career who was in lockstep with mine and plot his course as my projection - we flew together, were selectively chosen to instruct at the same university, and began at Republic on the same class date. Neither of us had any reason why we'd remain at Republic, so I think with our ambition level it's a best guess estimate. Of course, it's still an estimate.
Bad timing was certainly a factor, but even bigger than that was an overall shift in interest to another industry. I took a single grad-level class in finance as my form of "dipping my toes in", and once I was in, I was hooked.