Or build your own plane, for $100,000 or less, you can get something that performs far better than something that costs $500,000. Reasonable price range for a homebuilt 60-100K, reasonable price for a new airplane 150-500K. Not even close to worth it to buy a new (or used due to overhauls, inability to do the maint, paying someone for annuals, cost of components, etc) airplane these days. The only exception is picking up something real cheap, like an older 150 that doesn't need an overhaul. Those can still be operated for fairly cheap, along with similar airplanes. But, the point is, if you have a decent job, you can have a plane and enjoy aviation. Pretty hard to enjoy it slogging it out on trips exhausted out of your mind, flying the same routes, for pennies.

Bucking Bar

I might, just might, have to disagree with you on ALPA and outsourcing. Prior to the advent of the RJ, outsourcing was a limited factor, mostly traditional turboprops with 30 or fewer seats flying to destinations the mainline wasn't flying to anyway. The RJ changed all that, quickly. Now, the mainlines had a way to replace whole fleets of fuel-inefficient, mainline-paid crewed DC-9s and 737s. That entirely changed the economics of short haul flying as never before. The ATR was a vanguard but the RJs since 2001 were the real outsourcing disaster.

In short, ALPA and APA could stand for tight scope when there were no alternatives to the DC-9-15, but between the economy and the comparison in costs, the RJ won.

That said, EA had Bar Harbor flying from BGR and PWM to LGA in ATR 42-seaters. The flying was replaced by DL flying B727s, later MD-88s.

GF

Always Blew
 

I think it is true that the airlines always had furloughs and hardships however in the past it all was worth it once you made it up the list to the point where you could earn a brain surgeons salary.

These days all the struggle and sacrifice might result in besting a assistant managers wage at the local grocery store. In the past you could make up for all the furloughs, mergers and layoffs with a fat paycheck later in life and retirement when it was all over.

Now that most of that is gone or going the pot of gold at the end to compensate one for the decades of hardship is mostly empty. Might as well fill out the application at Safeway and stack apples.

Skyhigh

Unfortunately this is mostly right on...circumstances (management) has surgically removed most of the payoff from the career while leaving all of the BS intact. Since dues paying has always been part of the culture, people keep paying dues even though there's not going to be much return on them.