Stay safe out there. You guys do extremely important but quite dangerous work, often in very austere environments. I always laugh when fellow airline pilots tell me how tough we have it.
signed,
a prior rotorhead that jumped to the 121 world.
I spent a good chunk of my career working under part 137. I never made nearly the $ as you now do. I found it much more fulfilling than the 121 flying I currently do. I really miss it. Kinda feel like I sold my soul for a 16% DC.
Smart moves! I went the other way. Was an FO for $20k/year for a bit before seeing greener grass in rotorcraft. Whoops. Heli flying gets pretty tedious too. Lots of negative customer management and oversight at the moment and keeps getting worse.
I’ll gladly have a boring job that pays 300k+ a year over a fun flying job that pays crap…
Thanks for sharing. Interesting. Why not come on over to the 121(boring) side?
As others have said, thanks for what you do for all of us. No amount of money will replace the satisfaction of an important job well done. That said, there is no shame in switching to 121 so your kids can go to the college of there choice.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm glad some pay raises have reached the helicopter world. Just curious, what was pay like ~10 years ago?
And as others have mentioned, no shame in bailing to 121...if ever there was a time to come over it's now. I for one always appreciate flying with pilots that have a different background from the norm and the experience they bring.
~10 years ago I made $60-80k for the same work. Top pay I knew of back then was just under $100k. Now lots of base/1st year pay around $105-110k with pretty easy to achieve $130-140k. A big improvement but still plenty of room to grow if we're to keep anybody vibrating around in helicopters! I do think about rejoining your ranks, thanks for keeping threads like this one around and keeping the information out there! I have a side hustle tied to helicopters that is currently worth enough to keep me rooted in place or I would have tried to make the jump. If I keep reading these posts one of these years y'all will convince me!
I know fire guys who make six figures working the fire season 2 weeks on 2 weeks off and skiing the winter on unemployment.
For sure there are pretty decent fire and utility jobs out there for a few lucky folks. I am happy with the money I make but I'm not skiing on unemployment at the moment haha.