Originally Posted by Turbosina

I've flown with guys who spent 20 years doing everything possible to get to mainline (flying cancelled checks / night freight / Traffic Watch / pipeline patrol / right seat in a Metro making $12/hr), and finally made it to UAL right before 9/11...and were then promptly furloughed, briefly recalled, furloughed again and spent years out of the industry.

I also just flew with a 27-year-old newly minted Captain here at UAL, who spent ~6 mos at a regional before getting hired here. This person went to upgrade training a year after indoc. I didn't ask this individual's total time, but gauging from our discussion, I don't think it was much more than 2,500 hours or so.

Try to make any rational / logical sense out of this, and it will drive you insane. You're a CFI just past ATP minima and you're worried about upgrade at mainline? You can't let yourself think that way.

The hiring environment of the past few years has been so manic that some people seem to think that this is normal for the industry. Go and look at the fapa.aero site and see for yourself what happened in the Lost Decade. Some airlines hired literally nobody for almost a decade. You've now just witnessed the pendulum swinging in the other direction for the past few years. Presumably the next few years will be somewhere in the middle, with reasonable hiring and some growth. Or perhaps Putin will drop a tactical nuke and half of us will be out on furlough (among other rather more significant unpleasant events.)

There's just no way to know. All you can do is keep plugging away, building experience, networking, and moving forward. Focus on what you can control and try not to think about the rest of it. We've all been there — all of us — and at the end of the day, probably 98% of us would say that the struggle to get here was more than worth it.

Signed,
A Guy Who Didn't Get Hired At Mainline Until Age 50 But Who Has No Regrets