GuardPolice

I hesitate to even point this out but I’m surprised no one has yet.

Didn’t you leave only a regional airline career? You’re assuming you would have been hired by a major. I’m not suggesting you wouldn’t have made it to a major, but there are thousands of pilots who have a flying resume similar to yours that can’t get a call to make it to the next level. With that said, I guess writing these articles with a career's worth of regional wages isn’t as sexy as mainline career wages.

IMHO, you were a victim of bad timing entering our profession. That coupled with a potential spouse unwilling to accept the lifestyle our profession requires made for a rough time for you. You have my empathy; however, you’re not the first and certainly won’t be the last to go through these challenges.

Best of luck to you.

JohnBurke

Your "dream job" isn't going to come up. You've discussed your past far too much here, such that it's a well known quantity. You walked away with no significant experience, and your dream job requires just one thing: you stick with it. You didn't. You quit.

Your dream job is available any time; all you have to is...show up.

tomgoodman

Congratulations to Golden Goose on finding a new career that suits him better than his old one. In addition, he wisely avoided bashing and hurling epithets at those pilots who continue to pursue Aviation.

viper548

Did you commute? I've been an airline pilot for 14 years, 10 at a regional and 4 at a major. I've commuted about half the time at both jobs, and it sucks. Living in base is a completely different experience. Currently I live in base and bid short call reserve (by choice). I've flown 6 days so far this month and I only have 4 more reserve days left. I didn't have the seniority to get thanksgiving off but my reserve day starts at 6pm tomorrow. After 6pm on a holiday there's not much flying left. When I get a trip it's usually one leg out, spend the night and one leg back.

GoldenGooseGuy

That's a really great point, and one that I worked to address in my first article:

"We are assuming that everyone who signs up for $200K in loans is a successful major airline pilot. In reality, many aspiring pilots struggle to get started with their first flight job, lose their medical certificate, become disenchanted with the lifestyle, get stuck in lower paying flight jobs, fail out of training, or otherwise don’t make it to the highest-paying echelon."

As we all know in finance, past performance is no indication of future results. What I did was take my college buddy's career who was in lockstep with mine and plot his course as my projection - we flew together, were selectively chosen to instruct at the same university, and began at Republic on the same class date. Neither of us had any reason why we'd remain at Republic, so I think with our ambition level it's a best guess estimate. Of course, it's still an estimate.

Bad timing was certainly a factor, but even bigger than that was an overall shift in interest to another industry. I took a single grad-level class in finance as my form of "dipping my toes in", and once I was in, I was hooked.

GoldenGooseGuy

Thanks very much, Tom! Some of my goals here, along with time and financial freedom, is to show the value I found in having a Plan B, and in not putting all my (golden ) eggs in one career basket. Lifestyle choices are individual and I think these goals can still be accomplished without sacrificing one's dream job.

GoldenGooseGuy

I was forced to commute after the STL base closed, from STL-ORD. It was notoriously tough due to all the former TWA pilots and full airplanes that competed for a seat - often it was 3 or 4 flights before I caught one.

Congrats on living in base reserve, how high on the reserve seniority list do you stand? That sounds completely unlike my reserve experience, where we often flew 100-hour months.

GoldenGooseGuy

Good observations, I think the pay is the carrot on the stick that keeps many people going despite all of the other sacrifices. Republic was especially dysfunctional in that the majority of the employees saw them as a stepping stone, so they had no long-term interest. In the same way, the company saw the turnover as an opportunity to keep costs low, so they burned and churned people until they put themselves in the position of bankrupcty due to understaffing.

Corporate aviation has some of the qualities of a corporate non-flying job, I agree that it's a great option. It's just unfortunate how they are subject to the same turmoil due to the tendency of companies to use them as a first option for cost-cutting measures. In STL, one of our regional pilots who took the corporate route finally made it to a coveted Anheuser-Busch corporate flight department job after 5 years of trying, only to end up out on the street after the AB Inbev merger. After regrouping and getting a job at Peabody Energy, coal prices crashed flight jobs were cut (including our pilot friend) during the bankruptcy in 2016.

viper548

I'm about 60% in base, which would easily hold a line. I'm also about 60% on the reserve list. Reserve in base is a completely different experience than commuting to reserve, i've done both. My first 2-1/2 years here I did a 2 leg cross country commute. Once our seniority list finally got settled I was able to transfer to a base much closer to home. It was an easy commute, 10 flights a day on mainline. We can reserve the jumpseat, and the flights were rarely full. Last year I was in the jumpseat 4 times, 2 of them to get another non-rev on. Even with the easy commute I was giving up 5 hours going to work and 5 hours going home. Add in an occasional time or two getting in too late to make it home also. I figured I spent 23 days of the year just going to and from work. I now live 7 miles from the airport.
I bid reserve sometimes at SkyWest and though it occasionally sucked, overall it wasn't that bad.

Getting on with a major is not a guarantee, like you said. It looks like you were part of the lost decade. It's still not easy, but the numbers of guys getting hired are huge. A few airlines even have guaranteed flow to mainline. Envoy, Piedmont, PSA all flow to American. I don't know the timeline on that, but I think it would be easier to do your time at a regional KNOWING there is a light at the end of that tunnel. If you're set on staying in STL then airline flying is probably never going to be attractive to you. Congrats on finding something that makes you happy though. That's what really matters. BTW your numbers on major airline pay are very conservative. Plan 1100-1200 hours per year times the hourly rate to include the distance learning pay, training pay, per diem, profit sharing, performance bonus, etc. I think Delta is more like 1400. Also add 16% going into your 401k. 1000 hours would be pretty close to the bare minimum (flying low time, no premium, no picking up extra trips)

Skyguy85

So what makes more and gives you control of your own time? Since you said “many opportunities” I’d love to hear at least 3. Thanks for your prospective on making such a big career change!