Pilots today are often accused of having a sense of entitlement. Critics claim that they seem to have an unbalanced expectation that soon after training they would earn a good living and start out flying their hearts desire.

I can not see as how that is a bad thing. Shouldn't we all have a sense of entitlement? It takes a big cash and life investment to become a professional pilot. Should we all not set high expectations for our careers and hold the industry to it?

I went to college in the late 1980's. Times were good then for pilots. Airlines were hiring. Classmates who had graduated just a year or two prior would commonly return to campus with their TWA, Braniff or Pan Am uniform in a garment bag folder over their forearm. After a quick change in a closet the uniformed pilot would then be escorted into the nearest class interrupting the lecture in progress so that the valiant young airline hero could share tales of his airline life and explain why he went with the hard top corvette instead of the convertible.

We all expected to get hired at a major airline within a few years of graduation. No one suggested that we would be received by the industry any differently. Had we known what our generation of pilots faced I am sure that those speeches would have been given to empty classrooms.

I can empathize with pilots who were sitting in class a few years ago while recent graduates immediately went on to the regional of their choice. Now graduation the latest generation of pilots are dealing with the shock of a very different reception. In their backlash they are labeled as having an "entitlement" attitude and why shouldn't they? Aviation is not a religion it is an investment.

Skyhigh