You made some really great points. However; I would also like to add that most professionals ,who get a lay off notice, will eventually be able to find a job at similar pay at another employer. In aviation, one will start again at the bottom of the totem poll regardless of experience level if their employer closed shop (I.e. Comair, Compass etc.)

 

I picked up an office job, double pay from what I was making and aviation related for the meantime and day one realize how miserable I will be. I don't care if I'm flying cargo planes full of rubber dog **** with mav. I need back in the cockpit

 

Most professionals, once laid off, have to find a new employer because the old one will generally never hire them back. In many cases a downturn is viewed as an opportunity to clean house, or even if they had no choice, they're concerned you might hold a grudge... they'd rather just hire an eager, untainted youngster.

At least in aviation you get recalled in seniority order, if the airline still exists.

 

I would never leave. Times can be tough, but just remember the thousands of people who had the dream of being a pilot but never were able to afford it. Hang in there. It will get better.

 

Depends. The competitor will snatch up those employees who have experience/specialized skills and start them off at the same pay/level where they were previously at.

My brother , who works in banking, knew quite a few folks who worked at Lehman Brother’s, Anderson Co, etc. After the dust settled and they were hired elsewhere, they were making the same and in some cases more with their new employer.

Now if a Miami Air 737 CA or Compass CA finds a new job they start at the bottom on the seniority list/pay of their new shop, regardless of the experience they had.

 

Don't be so quick to say “never”

A lot of pilots used to have that attitude. “I’d never do anything else. I’d even do this for free”

Airlines responded by paying professional airline pilots salaries that were on par with fast food cashiers. Sometimes, they even let you pay them for the privilege of having a job.

Pilots owe it to themselves and the industry to refuse jobs that pay an insulting salary.

Absolutely find a second career and don’t come back to the airlines until things are at least as good as they were when the economy tanked. At least that’s my plan.

If they want me to pay for my own ATP and then accept $30,000 a year with no sign on bonus I’d be perfectly content sitting that one out for a while.

 

If you’re medically fit, you could look into military flying. Active duty will give you a 20+ career that will include non-flying assignments. Or you could do the Guard/Reserve which ebbs and flows with full-time opportunities, the benefit being you have more control of your career.

 

Yes, common enough. But if you get laid off, you have to assume you'll never get back with the previous employer, so it's full-on job search mode, which is it's own special hell, for many months. Or even years if times are bad. Very few white-collar folks will be getting new jobs at or above their current pay this year.

The contrast with our system is that you'll get recalled eventually, and can down-shift the lifestyle and do whatever odd jobs for a while until the recall, then you pick back up where you left off.

For an established airline pilot the only real threat of permanent job loss is Ch.7 liquidation (even with a medical issue you have LTD disability to age 65 if your union is on the ball).

Ch.7 is fortunately very rare, although we might see a few this year.

 

Did the OP ever stated his age and dependent life stage? All we're doing is relating our own predilections on staying or going based on our lives, which are not necessarily his situation.

fwiw, I love flying, but always detested the cyclical nature of the airline industry, so I went into government flying (mil). I'm not saying it's a preferrable option, it was only preferable to me. I do own my own aircraft, and I always have looked at that portion of my cost ledger as my transition away from paid flying if things didn't work out. I always have told myself if I was forced into a desk job, it had to have a baseline income that afforded me private airplane ownership. Otherwise it's a non-starter for me. I did engineering and academia while not making enough for an airplane to compensate. I was miserable.

At any rate, govt flying was a crapshoot too, so I'm not as much proferring it as an option as I'm just making the point that I've always treated the notion of civilian paid flying as a second-payer career. I know that may be offensive to the thousands of people who choose to make a primary-payer living out of flying for the airlines; that's just my prerogative. I'm now in a life stage where I have a minor child and wish to have a physical presence in his life beyond that of a migrant worker, so I prioritize a job that assures me that homesteading. To each their own.

At any rate, as to the comment about the mil job coing to an end before I can retire from work life. Noted. But that govt annuity, and more importantly, attaining de facto single-payer healthcare in my 40s (aka de coupled from employment outright) will allow me the flexibility to treat the industry with the commitment of a flaky college girlfriend going forward, for the piddly 12 or so years I'll have left between military retirement and my desired age for permanent retirement from full-time work. I know tons of people who have pursued airline work as a second career with solid govt pensions, and the ability to be able to pivot away when and if the lottery of timing doesn't work out through no fault of their own, is a very enviable position to have in relative terms.

To quote my favorite poker movie: You only lose what you put in the middle. Having a 50% income dependency from your household overhead baseline is a much less precarious position to be in when it comes to getting kicked in the teeth by an occupation known for being flaky and unreliable in the first place. As we say back home: "En guerra avisada no muere gente".

To each their own. Knowing the OP's life stage would help narrow down the advice. Good luck OP. Not the first nor the last one to deal with this transition. I'm glad I had this conversation at 15 years of age with my only close family friend and aviation mentor and not in my late 30s ( he was an Eastern casualty, lifer part 91 guy, staring at social security retirement, amazing human being but complete casualty of civilian aviation). Much luck and health to all in this downturn.

 

If you're going to make a low wage would you rather be running a cashier for little money, or flying airplanes for little money? I'd rather be flying airplanes.