Proskuneho,

Maybe none of my business ... but here's my $.02;

Get your MBA and get a good job doing something lucrative like investment banking or something. While you are on your way to that position, keep flying. Maybe continue to flight instruct or look locally for a part time job in something turbine sitting in the right seat and swing the gear for a while. Or buy a small single or an old light twin when you can and slowly build some hours that way. Add to your knowledge by taking some aerobatic instruction. Look into creating a side business with your plane by creating a syndicate or partnership of some sort.

After a while, you will be in a financial position to buy yourself a nice aircraft and fly for yourself taking your family on vacations and really enjoying the experience of being a pilot.

Much better to own the plane you fly that to have a boss telling you when and where to fly.

I appreciate your desire to have a job doing something that you really love to do, but there is a terrible tradeoff when your career and your family's financial stability is in a totally unstable industry and often in the hands of some greedy morons who have neither the intelligence nor the vision to lead an airline down a survivable path.

I chose the path you are on and now regret it. Yes, I DO love to fly and have had many many wonderful hours aloft feeling that I was stealing from somebody when I was getting paid to enjoy steering a big jet all over the world. Now I, along with thousands of other pilots, are stressing over how to house and feed our spouses and children because fuel prices have spiked, or the industry is in a tailspin, or your company is mismanaged so badly that their best solution is to pay their strongest competitor a billion dollars a year to literally take business away from them while they fire a thousand of their own pilots (maybe you can detect a hint of bitterness here).

I had a student while I was flight instructing who took the path you are thinking about leaving. He now enjoys a financially worry free life and flies his family to vacations in his own Citation. On the weekends, he enjoys an occasional loop and roll in his Citabria.

Think twice before you leap into this industry. It looks sexy from the airport fence, but there is far more turbulence than meets the eye.

8

P.S. Then again, just be sure you don't go to work for AIG, or Indy Mac, or Lehman Bros., or Merrill Lynch, or ...