Originally Posted by Amg4me

But there is a big elephant in the room!!! Imagine your child comes to you and says, I'm going spend four years in college, spend, at best, two years of additional training for a cost of about $90K and then get a job that pays, if I'm lucky, $40K a year for 10 years, until, again if I am lucky, I get called up to the Majors. During those 10 years, I'll work crappy hours, not be home on holidays and spend tons of time away from my family and my friends. What would you say? But 5 or 10 years ago, there were plenty of people willing to do this. Why? I have never understood this. For that amount of time and money invested, you could be a lawyer, an engineer, a PhD, a computer software developer, a CPA, who knows. So there is something about this job that from an economic standpoint doesn't make sense. To some extent, the pilots did it to themselves, when plenty of clearly intelligent, skilled folks are willing to work for peanuts, do you think the airline would say, no, I'll pay you more? The good thing is, now, there is much more demand so that there aren't enough people willing to work under those conditions to fill the demand. I have no sympathy for the regional airlines, but you can't say they were entirely at fault. There were plenty of folks standing in line to put up with that crap.