Originally Posted by
daytonaflyer
TheProfessionalPilot,
I know, life sucks on the bottom of the aviation ladder. It's one of those things you just have to live with for a while and suck it up. My career has been similar, probably worse than yours, as were many others.
I graduated college in August 2001, just one month before 9/11 happened. I could not get a commerical flying job to save my life. I took a part time customer service job at an FBO and another at a regional airline to pay the bills while I worked on my CFI and CFII. In 2003, I got my first CFI job paying $10/flight hr. They had only 1 student for me and there were 6 other new CFI's who were waiting to get students, so I had to look for another job.
I looked all over the country for another job and finally got a CFI job in Kentucky. It was horrible, with a terrible, venegeful manager and an owner who falsified the maintenance records on his airplanes. I made $10,000/year doing that, not even enough to live on. I also flew traffic watch part time in a C-172 with lousy maintenance. I had an engine failure 600ft above the ground on takeoff at night time, with passengers onboard and barely made it back to the airport. And I did that for $10/flight hr. After almost crashing due to lousy maintenance, I quit that job.
The next year I landed a CFI job in Phoenix that paid me $13,000/year, but at least the management was good and the planes were maintained. I sweated my ass off every single day in the afternoon Phoenix heat.
Finally, after I had 1400TT, I got a call from Scenic Airlines and went to work in a noisy, unpressurized turbo prop that I had to do the flight attendant briefings bent over in a hot plane that I couldn't even stand up in. It wasn't glamorous, but at least the managment was nice, the MX was good, and I enjoyed it. But it still only paid me about $19,000/year.
After a year of that, I moved to Detroit, MI and flew on-demand jet cargo in 40 year old airplanes for what turned out to be another lousy company. Just imagine having to hand load 5000 pounds of metal parts into the back of an airplane while bent over in south Texas heat and humidity with no air conditioning; you were soakin wet with sweat by the end. Then we had to fly to Canada where we would land on an icy runway with no thrust reversers and unload it in rain and freezing temperatures. And we did stuff like that a lot!
The next year I was able to transfer to the company's DFW base which gave me some sort of a personal life, but no raise in pay and no safer flying. That job paid me the hefty amount of $30,000/year plus per diem and I did it for about 2 years.
Finally, after about 5 years of suffering like this, moving around the country 5 times, and earning barely enough money to live on, I got a lucky break and made it to a job flying an MD-80 that I'm very happy at with the potential to make a pretty good living.
My point is...this is what you have to do to make it in this industry. Most of the new guys will probably never have to suffer through the post 9/11 crap that we did, and that's a very good thing. But you are going to have crappy jobs that don't pay very well. You are going to be treated like dirt by management. Suck it up, work hard, fly safe, and make the best of it; eventually it will pay off and you WILL end up in a good job. If you're not willing to put up with what it takes to get to that level, then you should probably find a different career.