---

You get real man. Doctors DONT = Pilots. You have NO IDEA if most doctors would find it easy studying for their 757 type. You don't even know if any of them would grasp aerodynamics. Different people with different personalities ACCEL at different things.

I respect doctors, but they don't belong on a pedestal JUST because they're a doctor. They aren't BETTER then pilots. Plenty of doctors KILL themselves flying airplanes. I don't see how since apparently it's WAAAAY easier to be a pilot. Some people.

---

---

The professional pilot vs. MD debate always seems to get off track (usually by those who underestimate both professions). The reality is they are both highly skilled professions, requiring years of training and a great financial expenditure (unless you go the military route, and then you pay in another form) to reach the level of working professionally. Anyone who claims otherwise is a moron. I also believe both have seen a deterioration in their overall compensation due to varying factors (though I think pilots have been hit much, much harder).

I do however maintain that if the deterioration of this industry continues, you will eventually see a trend that will prove hard to reverse:

The quality of people who have chosen to become pilots in the past will no longer do so (or won't continue to do it after a military career). Instead those positions will be filled with people with a reduced aptitude for the skills required to do the job well - the ability to process information and make decisions continually in real time, the ability to receive information from a number of sources (often conflicting) and make a good decision based on that information, managerial skills, the ability to occasionally make split second decisions correctly, and the required manual dexterity to list just a few. None of these unto themselves is particularly hard to find, but taken together they form a somewhat unique skill set which makes one well suited to the task.

Now, when you start filling these positions with those with those of a lesser aptitude, you are eventually going to see a decrease in performance. In our business, that is measured in mass fatalities. It won't happen immediately, because we (as an industry) have done a very good job of engineering safety into many aspects of the system. What you will eventually see though, is an increase in accidents and fatalities. Instead of an Al Haynes saving 184 lives through his skill, judgment, and use of resources; you'll see a crippled aircraft crash with a loss of all on board in what experts will deem "an unforseeable (BS) and unsurvivable failure." It will be hard to put your finger on, but it will occur. We may be at the beginning of that trend, or it may not rear it's head for another five or ten years - I don't know.

This precisely addresses the idiotic crap but forth such as those who cite the alleged Mythbusters example (I haven't seen that episode). Every one of us who is a real pilot knows good and well the usually the sim techs can do a better job flying the sim than we can. Of course they can! IT'S A FRICKING VIDEO GAME!!! THEY PLAY IT EVERY NIGHT FROM 1am TO 5am!!! THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO!!! [and I say this not to denigrate sim training or sim techs in any way, again those on here who do something beyond flying flight sim know precisely of what I am speaking]

I've never met a sim tech who claims they can do our job - the mere ability to remember to apply 8 pounds of back pressure to raise the nose 2.5 degrees a 40' radio altitude does not a professional aviator make, any more than the ability to wear a white coat and say "It's probably a virus, if Junior isn't better in three days, bring him back in and we'll look at him again" makes me a doctor.

Those who get on here and denigrate the profession are most likely either:
1) Management plants who should go stick their heads in an oven

2) Twelve year olds playing flight sim (again, with no disrespect towards many twelve year olds who could do a much better job of running an airline than boobs like Tilton et. al.

3) The very people who I believe are going to cause the above trend to occur.

I personally don't think being an airline pilot is rocket science. Rocket scientists don't have to possess many of the strengths and skills that I do. Nor do I have the proclivity towards advanced mathematics which rockets scientists find to be childs play. I am a highly trained, specialized, and qualified professional - and I deserve to be compensated as such.

THAT IS THE TRUE BOTTOM LINE.

To quote Torch Lewis always (for those of you who read BCA): "'Nuff said."

---

---

---

---

I respect doctors, but they don't belong on a pedestal JUST because they're a doctor. They aren't BETTER then pilots. Plenty of doctors KILL themselves flying airplanes. I don't see how since apparently it's WAAAAY easier to be a pilot. Some people.

---