Breif Stint?
To me my aviation dream was not a "brief stint". I took my first lesson at 14 years of age and slowly climbed the ladder from there. I paid my own way through college and bought all my ratings one at a time. I did not have a sponsor opening doors for me. Each job I got was hard campaigned for. The longer it took and the harder the trail was my expectations grew to justify my sacrifices. When my non-flying friends were buying houses and getting married I was sleeping in my truck and dreaming of a studio apartment.
I did not quit. I was in my upper 30's when my company shut down. I tried to find another decent flying job but could not find one that was worth risking my families happiness over for the money being offered. Just the other night I had dinner with two pilot friends who were passing through town in a shared Uhaul. They both had been laid off from their corporate job and were moving their families back home in the west. One is going to start college in the fall the other has no idea of what to do.
Neither of them are facing an attractive future. One of them had to leave a foreclosed home. That is the problem with this career. It is a treadmill of broken dreams. Pilots get in reach a point where they are financially squeezed out of the industry and then silently start over. New pilots need the facts. They need to know what their statistical chances are. Having a good attitude is far from being good enough.
I believed in what I was doing because I thought surly it would lead to a better life. I thought that there was no way life or aviation could deny a determined man his due after such an effort. Over time I began to notice that none of my peers seemed to be making it to their dreams either. Most of my ex co-workers who are still in aviation are now stuck in the middle east.
What kind of life is that?
Skyhigh