Originally Posted by
123494
Well, that’s because pilots are not an educated professional group, or not in the sense that most people think of. We are blue-collar, union trade workers. Our profession is more aligned with unionized plumbers and pipe fitters than lawyers and engineers.
Need proof? Just look at how the majority of pilots act in the hotels on overnights.
Common fallacy. We are most definitely professionals in every sense of the word, we are trained, licensed, and bound by duty to exercise our professional judgement to maximize safety.
True blue collar workers just build what the engineers tell them to build. Blue collar workers always have expert guidance and can always fall back on the code or an engineer/architect. We get information provided by various people, none of whom have our expertise and SA on flight safety, and we have to weigh all of that and make the call. The best fallback position we have is to consult with a management pilot (who is no more or less credentialed than we are), but ultimately the PIC still makes the call.
Now it's correct to say that our careers have blue-collar characteristics (unions, seniority, etc). But the FAA doesn't care one little whit about that, they license us to be professionals and expect us to perform accordingly. If you start thinking of yourself as someone you just attaches bolts to widgets on an assembly line, you're copping out.