I am the classic aviation dreamer college kid followed by several years as a flight instructor. Then I moved into Alaska bush flying for more then five years to be followed by time as a corporate/charter/medivac jet guy. Eventually I made it to a regional and after two years moved onto a Low Cost Carrier as a 757 FO for three years before they imploded.

I did everything I could to make my dream come true. Knocked on doors and took the best jobs that I was offered. I sent out applications and resumes to every airline I knew of and regularly attended job fairs across the country. I networked with all my friends. It was a long and hard road. Most of the time I was miserable. As a professional pilot my quality of life was worse than when I was in college. I slept in hangars and on couches. And was poor most of the time.

Most of my flying jobs were filled with high adventure though that was not my goal. My dream was to fly for Alaska Airlines and I eagerly would have traded my time as a smokejumper pilot and all the rest to have gotten a job with them long ago. I got as far as a two interviews before I was laid off from my 757 job and the market tanked. By then I had a wife two kids and one on the way.

We had hardly moved into our first starter home as a family when we had to leave it and go back to living in a two bedroom apartment on $1300 a month of unemployment. No health insurance and no job prospects. Everyone that I knew at the time was unemployed also.

Having a family in tow changes your perspectives a lot. I was tired of packing my family into a rusty old UHaul every few years to move to yet another dead end job. By the time I was 36 and after nearly two decades of effort it was becoming obvious that I was getting nowhere in life as a pilot.

Skyhigh