Flying is different from other things. I believe it attracts people who love doing it, and are just plain willing to put up with a certain amount of pain because most of us want to fly more than we can afford to do as a hobby. Or we are infected with SJS, and want to fly a plane we can’t afford to fly unless it’s owned by someone else who pays us to fly it. I really don’t see how you can get around this simply by trying to organize pilots of all different stripes into a unified bloc that refuses to work for less than wage X…never mind the difficulty of agreeing on what X should be. That is not the same as saying we SHOULD accept crappy pay in this profession; every pilot should be trying to elevate the profession, but understand that there are a million different definitions of "acceptable" out there.

I would have to accept a 70-80% pay cut to go to a professional flying career – regional, fractional, part 135, whatever – and even so, I want to get into professional flying because its the only way I can fly 500-800 hours a year. I got jumped on in another thread for saying that no one should get into a career solely for the money or because other people might think what you do is cool, but since the king of cool started this thread maybe I can say it here without being decapitated. You should only get into a flying career if you love everything that happens from wheels up to touchdown, and your other options don’t allow you the time and money to feed your jones.

I'm still undecided on how to fly as much as I want to (I have a measly 650 TT since starting my PPL in 1991), but I hereby pledge not to go to Mesa