It’s not that hard, be nice and professional, don’t be weird or tell crude jokes. You can also go out to dinner with the crew, just be respectful, have a drink or two but don’t get drunk, then go back to your room alone afterwards.

Good rules to follow: view your colleagues as colleagues and not conquests, don’t start doing shots, nothing good happens after 10PM.

Not that hard.

< ------- Because I am John Cleese.

Common fallacy. We are most definitely professionals in every sense of the word, we are trained, licensed, and bound by duty to exercise our professional judgement to maximize safety.

True blue collar workers just build what the engineers tell them to build. Blue collar workers always have expert guidance and can always fall back on the code or an engineer/architect. We get information provided by various people, none of whom have our expertise and SA on flight safety, and we have to weigh all of that and make the call. The best fallback position we have is to consult with a management pilot (who is no more or less credentialed than we are), but ultimately the PIC still makes the call.

Now it's correct to say that our careers have blue-collar characteristics (unions, seniority, etc). But the FAA doesn't care one little whit about that, they license us to be professionals and expect us to perform accordingly. If you start thinking of yourself as someone you just attaches bolts to widgets on an assembly line, you're copping out.

This is exactly what management thinks of us, and wants us to think of ourselves.

To be fair we’re not white collar either because we are labor. Your position can be replaced at any time by someone cheaper and it wouldn’t effect anything. If you ask a regular person from the street they would probably classify it as a highly technical blue collar job. Anyone can do it, sticking to the career is another matter. The only reason why we make the white collar money is because of the unions. I honestly don’t care what it is, they still think you’re cool at parties and the money is good.

I think it’s difficult to place them in one category or the other because the definitions of blue collar and white collar are becoming increasingly muddled over time. While it’s true that the term “blue collar” traditionally referred to those in manufacturing and in trades, the US has comparatively few manufacturing jobs left, and traditional “blue collar” type jobs don’t occupy a whole lot of the labor force. We used to group people based on whether their job was white collar, blue collar, or an unskilled laborer position. Now though the terms white collar and blue collar are often used to differentiate between people with formal education, like computer programmers, and people without it, like call center workers. So with the watering down of the terms, it’s easy to argue that pilots kind of ride the line between the two: their profession doesn’t categorically necessitate formal education (one can be a pilot with only a high school degree), but they’re also not unskilled laborers.

But I would agree with Rick's point that pilots are professionals because of their high level of training and responsibility. Although flight school bears more resemblance to an electrician's trade school than it bears to law school, I think the level of professional responsibility that pilots have bears more resemblance to other "professional" positions than it bears to an electrician.

Plus we wear a suit and tie to work, who does that these days?

I like how this thread went from pilots being paranoid of passenger/FA interaction to being paranoid of being labeled white/blue collar workers.

Well at least we stayed on topic.

Do any of you wake up in the morning and feel like a complete loser? I do all the time when I think of career choice and my life in general.