Originally Posted by
widebodyjunkie
So basically I need to decide on rather or not I'm okay with living off crappy pay, possible furlough's, long exhausting schedules for the majority of my airline career? i'm not soo sure I can do that....how the hell does anyone live on 30K a year? It can be done i'm sure, but you'd have to sacrafice a lot...and for what! To be employed by an airline, making peanuts for pay, and praying every single day that you still have a job when you go to work? What posseses people to go into this profession with this much of a stagnant outlook?
Good Question! Pre-9/11 there appeared to be excellent prospects for moving on to a major after 4 years (or less) with a regional. Major airline CA pay approached or exceeded $300K at the top end, and work rules and QOL were better back then. I personally could not have made the same justification to switch careers today that I did back then.
Originally Posted by
widebodyjunkie
What about airline pilots that transition into something else? Say....go to work at a regional for a year or two to build up the turbine time, would you have much luck being able to get on at a corporate job that way? I'm going to probably guess no, because so many pilots today are trying to get out of the airlines and into the corporate job so......competition baby!!
Right now, the market might be kind of tight. A corporate wanna-be has two options...
1) Network his way up through GA. This is time-consuming, and it can be hard to get the turbine PIC needed for the best jobs. There is often no seniority system...if you are a co-pilot and your captain quits, odds are they will hire another captain off the street instead of promoting you if you don't have the PIC they want. Often insurance dictates the experience requirements, so the owner's hands are tied.
2) Go regional first and get a few 1000 hours of turbine time, and hopefully 1000 turbine PIC. The advantage here is you have the underlaying base experience for insurance purposes. The downside is that many corporate operators are leary of airline pilots...we basically show up, walk on the airplane, pre-flight, and go. The corporate pilot has many more duties, including flight-planing, cleaning, and customer interaction. It's a different mind-set, and some pilots with the "Airline Stink" have trouble adapting. But if you wanted to do it you could, but you would have to work to break into corporate at the entry level. Be aware that you definately need to be sociable and people-oriented, more so than airlines.
Also corporate is a mixed bag...many operators are shady or downright dangerous, and working conditions and schedules are often poor. The best corporate jobs have pay and QOL approaching the the best (most senior) airline jobs.