Originally Posted by
benairguitar23
I'm not a Colgan pilot but I have heard that the QOL is not so good. I've heard of a few pilots that go just to get PIC jet time then leave as quick as they can. But I would get more info from people who fly there. My real purpose for posting was to say, I will trade you....your law school seat for my PA-44 instructing seat. The way the industry is right now I would much rather have a law degree to fall back on than continuing to HOPE that the industry will get better...especially as a furloughed airline pilot
. I truly wish I had the money to go to law school right now but instead I get to pay back outrageous student loans and HOPE I eventually get to mainline
. Hope everything goes well for you in your search and we'll talk with you later.
As someone who has been in both law and medical school (both good ones, too, fwiw)--I'm sick and tired of people in aviation with this grass-is-greener mentality. Repeat after me:
-Being an RJ FO or CFI is better than being in law or med school
-Being an RJ FO or CFI is better than being in law or med school
-Being an RJ FO or CFI is better than being in law or med school
-Being an RJ FO or CFI is better than being in law or med school
Ok...rinse, repeat, you'll understand once you get there...
This of course is assuming you desire to work less than 60-100 hours in the same, crushingly uniform office/hospital/etc. for the next 8-10 years before paying off your loans, which will be 2.5 to 3.0 times what your aviation loans were. And when I said 60-100 hours per week, I don't mean like flying 60-100 hours per week, where you have a bunch of "down time" on VFR days...I mean really, truly, sitting there and working. Imagine every spare minute you were in the cockpit/on a ground sit/in between legs/in the hotel on a long layover that instead of watching TV, surfing the net, reading the USA today, or doing sudoku you were reading your CFM, FOM, and problem-based scenarios based off of them and being expected to regurgitate verbatim roughly 90-100% of the information within, in addition to using that information to analyze real-world scenarios with 90-100% accuracy...
We may have our flight geeks who do the above, but 90% of us have a heck of a lot better QOL than Doctors/Lawyers...and unless you can't make it to a corp. or mainline gig within 8-10 years of getting out of flight instructing, it's a financial wash, even at these payrates, even in this economy...