If being a pilot is so bad...
01-20-2009, 07:48 PM
#51
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Nov 2005
Position: UPS 757/767 Capt ONT
Posts: 4,357
"As he mundanely told his tale with disinterested gusto my mind was traumatized as his story sunk in. I couldn't believe that he had stuck it out for so long and for what seemed like a pittance in the shadow of what he had to go through."
Sky, you were never cut out for this job. I'm so glad you found something better. I wish you had run away with from the Air Inc conference knowing this biz was just not for you.....
Sky, you were never cut out for this job. I'm so glad you found something better. I wish you had run away with from the Air Inc conference knowing this biz was just not for you.....
01-21-2009, 06:11 AM
#52
Self Employed.
Joined APC: May 2005
Position: Corporate Pilot
Posts: 7,119
Me too
Originally Posted by de727ups
"As he mundanely told his tale with disinterested gusto my mind was traumatized as his story sunk in. I couldn't believe that he had stuck it out for so long and for what seemed like a pittance in the shadow of what he had to go through."
Sky, you were never cut out for this job. I'm so glad you found something better. I wish you had run away with from the Air Inc conference knowing this biz was just not for you.....
Sky, you were never cut out for this job. I'm so glad you found something better. I wish you had run away with from the Air Inc conference knowing this biz was just not for you.....
However I can't imagine that most people would be comfortable with that situation either. If most of us were to know how our careers would turn out from day one then we would have a lot fewer airline pilots. I wonder if the DC-9 captain knew that half of his pay would be snatched away just after making it to the left seat he would have made some different career choices earlier on?
SkyHigh
Last edited by SkyHigh; 01-21-2009 at 07:07 AM.
01-21-2009, 06:49 AM
#53
Self Employed.
Joined APC: May 2005
Position: Corporate Pilot
Posts: 7,119
Control
I never liked giving up so much control over my life as you have to when you are a pilot. During my part 135 days I hated being tied to a pager. I especially hated being the play toy of a self absorbed executive. They were constantly changing the schedule. You never really knew if you would make it home that day or not. A 4 hour trip easily turned into three days on the road. No matter what I was told after a while I would always bring a small bag with at least a tooth brush. I spent plenty of blue bird days waiting around at FBO's for tantrum throwing people in blue suits. A two hour wait would turn into 4 then 6 then 12. finally I would be on my way home and dispatch would call and divert me to someplace else.
As a charter pilot for one of my past employers I was on 24 hour call and would be on duty for 21 days in a row with 4 days off. One time I had been called by dispatch at 2:00AM for a flight that ended back home by 11:00AM. I stayed up till my normal bed time so I could get back on my normal sleep pattern then I was called again at 12:30AM since my 8 hours of rest were up by then. I was back in the late in morning and again that night I was called for a trip. I ended up going for nearly three days without sleep. I was miserable. Guys over 50 seem to be able to stay awake all night and sleep mid-day if they wanted. I could not. I did not like loosing control over when I could sleep.
Then came the airlines. The schedule made things better. 12 hour reserve was nice. I could plan my sleep better, but nearly everything else was out of my hands. As an airline pilot you do not have much control over where you live. How you live. What kind of plane you will fly. Your career progression. What kind of clothes you will wear while at work. Who you will fly with. How much money you will make. Humans can adapt to changes however changes in the airlines were either painfully slow as with upgrade or blindingly fast, like how quickly a company could go down the drain.
By the end of my career I was beginning to become comfortable with my profession and really began to feel that I had found my place. I had been on the same equipment for three years and was becoming very skilled at most everything that had to do with the 757 and my company. I was senior enough that I could control my schedule a bit and upgrade was just around the corner. My pay was still lousy but we had just refinanced our home loan to a lower payment and were in the process of paying down our credit cards. I was beginning to feel that we had made it. I was looking forward to going to work. My wife was starting to see the benefits of an airline life when the company shut down.
Yet again by the time I wanted to stay I had control taken away. Executives were making decisions behind closed doors that directly effected my life. No control. Today I may not be able to control the government or economy but have a say in much more that I ever had as a pilot. My value is not tied to a seniority number or to the actions of unseen executives anymore. I still have to do things that I am not all that excited about but instead of being lead about by others I am my own task master. Control is an illusion but it is still nice to be able to think that you have some say in what happens to you. As a pilot you can not even pretend that you have any input. The people who have ultimate control over your life have names and titles. As a matter of practice they like to disrupt the peace of their subordinates to remind them that they are being lead. I sleep much better now.
SkyHigh
As a charter pilot for one of my past employers I was on 24 hour call and would be on duty for 21 days in a row with 4 days off. One time I had been called by dispatch at 2:00AM for a flight that ended back home by 11:00AM. I stayed up till my normal bed time so I could get back on my normal sleep pattern then I was called again at 12:30AM since my 8 hours of rest were up by then. I was back in the late in morning and again that night I was called for a trip. I ended up going for nearly three days without sleep. I was miserable. Guys over 50 seem to be able to stay awake all night and sleep mid-day if they wanted. I could not. I did not like loosing control over when I could sleep.
Then came the airlines. The schedule made things better. 12 hour reserve was nice. I could plan my sleep better, but nearly everything else was out of my hands. As an airline pilot you do not have much control over where you live. How you live. What kind of plane you will fly. Your career progression. What kind of clothes you will wear while at work. Who you will fly with. How much money you will make. Humans can adapt to changes however changes in the airlines were either painfully slow as with upgrade or blindingly fast, like how quickly a company could go down the drain.
By the end of my career I was beginning to become comfortable with my profession and really began to feel that I had found my place. I had been on the same equipment for three years and was becoming very skilled at most everything that had to do with the 757 and my company. I was senior enough that I could control my schedule a bit and upgrade was just around the corner. My pay was still lousy but we had just refinanced our home loan to a lower payment and were in the process of paying down our credit cards. I was beginning to feel that we had made it. I was looking forward to going to work. My wife was starting to see the benefits of an airline life when the company shut down.
Yet again by the time I wanted to stay I had control taken away. Executives were making decisions behind closed doors that directly effected my life. No control. Today I may not be able to control the government or economy but have a say in much more that I ever had as a pilot. My value is not tied to a seniority number or to the actions of unseen executives anymore. I still have to do things that I am not all that excited about but instead of being lead about by others I am my own task master. Control is an illusion but it is still nice to be able to think that you have some say in what happens to you. As a pilot you can not even pretend that you have any input. The people who have ultimate control over your life have names and titles. As a matter of practice they like to disrupt the peace of their subordinates to remind them that they are being lead. I sleep much better now.
SkyHigh
Last edited by SkyHigh; 01-21-2009 at 08:00 AM.
01-21-2009, 07:08 AM
#54
Line Holder
Joined APC: Mar 2006
Posts: 42
Originally Posted by hindsight2020
I only did engineering school for 8 years but I did stay at a holiday inn last night. You didn't compute the median of anything; you didn't account for the real distribution function of seniority, the real distribution function of CA/FO ratio, the weigh factor per airline if said airline flies more than one equipment. Your number is an exercise in simple arithmetic mean with wicked right-skewed assumptions (i.e. putting 50% (ie unweighted) of Delta's "CA's" under a simple mean..6400 bodies to be exact, capping off the chart for 76- equipment... ***). Your math is a crude shot at averaging, which is exactly what one cannot do if one intends to accurately portray a statistical sample where a lot of people are on ramen noodles compared to a few who are rolling immorally well... aka the airlines.
Since APC does not provide such distribution functions to properly weigh the payscales, let's say the difference between capping out and nominal CA starting seniority on the charts for the majors (the largest culprits of statistical outliers on the x-axis [pay]) is a generous 20% across the board (I'm left-sizing your wicked right-skewed CA figures for the bulk of legacies to a simple mean since I do not have the distribution functions for CA/FO seniorities and ratios for Delta, American and United). That still puts the MEDIAN for the whole 121 biz at 70K, which is about par for the course. I actually plotted the population distribution as a function of pay scale across all data points given on APC (270 data points) and the x-y scatter makes a funny picture that looks like two people standing on Mt everest looking at a huge purple blob of un-declutterable points at the bottom. What an industry I tell ya....
THE PROBLEM is that you cannot suggest with a straight face that said 70K was the result of working 9-5, being home every night, and having weekends off and the rational assumption of the median that income retention and lateral careerism is a given. As you suggested, when normalized for an hourly figure that could be applied to banking hours you're looking at 19.44/hr...holy sh$t, the opportunity cost is working a 37K 9-5 job and taking the rest of the week off. There's your disparity right there. I can chuck a stone at a bank and land a 35-40K job with a pulse and a degree in basket weaving. This effectively says that the extra time pilots are volunteering their time they are effectively getting paid in takeoff and landings. That's fair enough, but don't call it pay.These computations don't even address the level of applicants that give up within two years of regional work, that would put the number even lower if one were to account for the unemployed and disenchanted who are otherwise qualified.
Look, the reality is that to attain a sustainable airline career that consistenly rewards you above REAL six figure income, when adjusted for hours away from home, discontinuity in pay and the foregoing of the lateral career options that is available to 99% of the population, is to hedge our bets on a statistical crapshoot. This means that the opportunity cost is gonna have to be individually assessed and it's certainly not competitive with other careers that demand time away from home (oil rig work, military and federal civil service, etc). I don't think the sunset at FL370 is really worth that opportunity cost to the median pilot, when all is said and done. But there are enough hobby pilots in the career nowadays to drown that POV for the offering that "it's what you make of it" and that subsidizing non-livable wages for the lower 25th percentile of the sample pool is justifiable, desirable, and worthwhile.
People say, "well 70K is not that bad, I'd do it over again", I say that's disingenous rationalizing from people who are not stuck in that position. It's always "reasonable" to make judgement calls on quality of life when you're not the one being confronted with said constraints. Those who are confronted with such realities and speak up about it are called whiners, after all, poverty is a moral choice according to the peanut gallery of the statistically fortunate. Gimme a break. The reality is that most people DO NOT think 70K as an aggregate income potential goal when pursuing an airline career, SJS included. Most people still choose to delude themselves into thinking that it's a simpleton function of "paying dues" and "staying the course" that's going to reward them with two-sigma to the right of individual median income compensation. That COULD be true of our aforementioned banking job, heck even civil service would net you six figures by holding out long enough, but airline work? Couldn't be farther from the truth.
The reality is that when you put rubber to the pavement with respect to these median income calculation for pilots and translate to actual circumstances, the best the median can cumulatively attain is the prayer of a regional CA lifer job that doesn't get furloughed. Plan accordingly. I did that math and decided said employment conditions and compensation was not worth mortgaging my family and personal relationships. For others that analysis will be different. But stop telling the world 777 widebody CA is "what you make of it" and fundamentally a function of perseverance, REAL LIFE be damned, that's just condescending and misinformed.
Since APC does not provide such distribution functions to properly weigh the payscales, let's say the difference between capping out and nominal CA starting seniority on the charts for the majors (the largest culprits of statistical outliers on the x-axis [pay]) is a generous 20% across the board (I'm left-sizing your wicked right-skewed CA figures for the bulk of legacies to a simple mean since I do not have the distribution functions for CA/FO seniorities and ratios for Delta, American and United). That still puts the MEDIAN for the whole 121 biz at 70K, which is about par for the course. I actually plotted the population distribution as a function of pay scale across all data points given on APC (270 data points) and the x-y scatter makes a funny picture that looks like two people standing on Mt everest looking at a huge purple blob of un-declutterable points at the bottom. What an industry I tell ya....
THE PROBLEM is that you cannot suggest with a straight face that said 70K was the result of working 9-5, being home every night, and having weekends off and the rational assumption of the median that income retention and lateral careerism is a given. As you suggested, when normalized for an hourly figure that could be applied to banking hours you're looking at 19.44/hr...holy sh$t, the opportunity cost is working a 37K 9-5 job and taking the rest of the week off. There's your disparity right there. I can chuck a stone at a bank and land a 35-40K job with a pulse and a degree in basket weaving. This effectively says that the extra time pilots are volunteering their time they are effectively getting paid in takeoff and landings. That's fair enough, but don't call it pay.These computations don't even address the level of applicants that give up within two years of regional work, that would put the number even lower if one were to account for the unemployed and disenchanted who are otherwise qualified.
Look, the reality is that to attain a sustainable airline career that consistenly rewards you above REAL six figure income, when adjusted for hours away from home, discontinuity in pay and the foregoing of the lateral career options that is available to 99% of the population, is to hedge our bets on a statistical crapshoot. This means that the opportunity cost is gonna have to be individually assessed and it's certainly not competitive with other careers that demand time away from home (oil rig work, military and federal civil service, etc). I don't think the sunset at FL370 is really worth that opportunity cost to the median pilot, when all is said and done. But there are enough hobby pilots in the career nowadays to drown that POV for the offering that "it's what you make of it" and that subsidizing non-livable wages for the lower 25th percentile of the sample pool is justifiable, desirable, and worthwhile.
People say, "well 70K is not that bad, I'd do it over again", I say that's disingenous rationalizing from people who are not stuck in that position. It's always "reasonable" to make judgement calls on quality of life when you're not the one being confronted with said constraints. Those who are confronted with such realities and speak up about it are called whiners, after all, poverty is a moral choice according to the peanut gallery of the statistically fortunate. Gimme a break. The reality is that most people DO NOT think 70K as an aggregate income potential goal when pursuing an airline career, SJS included. Most people still choose to delude themselves into thinking that it's a simpleton function of "paying dues" and "staying the course" that's going to reward them with two-sigma to the right of individual median income compensation. That COULD be true of our aforementioned banking job, heck even civil service would net you six figures by holding out long enough, but airline work? Couldn't be farther from the truth.
The reality is that when you put rubber to the pavement with respect to these median income calculation for pilots and translate to actual circumstances, the best the median can cumulatively attain is the prayer of a regional CA lifer job that doesn't get furloughed. Plan accordingly. I did that math and decided said employment conditions and compensation was not worth mortgaging my family and personal relationships. For others that analysis will be different. But stop telling the world 777 widebody CA is "what you make of it" and fundamentally a function of perseverance, REAL LIFE be damned, that's just condescending and misinformed.
Anyway, I made the change from airline to corporate , if you call that a change, and find it much more family oriented with equal to better pay. But, it came with a little work and a lot of luck.
01-21-2009, 10:37 AM
#55
Stethoscope
Joined APC: Feb 2006
Posts: 308
Originally Posted by SkyHigh
Then came the airlines. The schedule made things better. 12 hour reserve was nice. I could plan my sleep better, but nearly everything else was out of my hands. As an airline pilot you do not have much control over where you live. How you live. What kind of plane you will fly. Your career progression. What kind of clothes you will wear while at work. Who you will fly with. How much money you will make. Humans can adapt to changes however changes in the airlines were either painfully slow as with upgrade or blindingly fast, like how quickly a company could go down the drain. SkyHigh
You see now this is the part that I don’t understand when it comes to pilots who have left the industry because they stopped liking their job or are in the industry but don’t like their job. Sky, before you made the decision to become a professional pilot, what exactly did you think a pilot’s life entailed? Did you not do your research before jumping in? Did you not test the waters; kick the tires a little bit? Seriously what did you think you were getting into? Did you think that you were getting into a 9-5 job, home every night or even every other night, or even every 2or 3 nights? You never thought that you might have to be extended every now and then, sometimes more often that you would like? Did you not know that as a pilot you would have to move to where your job is or did you think that every company home based their pilots? Did you not know that you would be living out of suitcases and hotels for the rest of your life (depending on what kind of flying you did)? Did you think that after being hired you could demand what kind of plane you wanted to fly and would accept nothing else? Did you think that every company has the same upgrading system or did you not know that upgrading can go from less than one year to more than 12 years? Did you think that you could pick and choose who you wanted to fly with and what to wear at work or did you not know that most professional pilots have a uniform?
I could go on and on and on but you get the point. WHAT IN THE WORLD DID YOU THINK YOU WERE GETTING INTO!!! With all due respect, if you did not know any of this and still went into the industry then you have no one to blame but yourself, and if you knew all this before going in, then you should have had a reasonable back up plan, that way if it’s all too much for you, simply implement your back up plan, and WALK AWAY!!!
01-21-2009, 10:52 AM
#56
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Jan 2008
Posts: 1,383
Him and I both have answered these questions in the past. Both of us got in around the early 90's, and did know what we were getting into........Stability, QOL, and a good retirement. You might have been too young to remember....
01-21-2009, 11:09 AM
#58
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Oct 2006
Position: NU Guy
Posts: 437
Originally Posted by cargo hopeful
Really?!!! You mean to say that there was once STABILITY in the airline world? Are you saying that the cyclical nature of the airline industry only recently started after the early 90’s? Hmm, that’s news to me.
01-21-2009, 11:38 AM
#59
On Reserve
Joined APC: Jul 2008
Position: Looking for professional flying opportunities..
Posts: 19
Originally Posted by boarderdw
I have a finance degree, no college debt, and worked at the world headquarters of a fortune 500 company out of college as a financial analyst. My salary was 58,000. It was so mind numbingly boring I quit after less then 6 months.
I decided to enroll at a Florida pilot factory and spent 65,000 on my ratings. Excessive, but oh well. In just over two years I was hired at a regional. I flew a turbo prop for a year, fulfilled my contract and then went to the regional of my choice.
I've been at my current regional for just over 2 years. I'm 28 years old. I fly planes that are less then 2 years old. I average between 3,800 and 4,000 bucks a month in pay (per diem included). I have consistently had between 15 and 18 days off for over a year. I am able to get at least 7 days off in a row every month. I only fly day trips and two day trips. I see my wife every single day and we go on a trip of some sort at least once a month. She sometimes joins me on my overnights and we have a blast.
This job rules. To those of you who are choosing to walk away, all I can say is I'm sorry about your timing or the airline you chose to fly for. You should have had higher standards or you should have been more patient. Trust me, the grass IS NOT greener on the other side.
I decided to enroll at a Florida pilot factory and spent 65,000 on my ratings. Excessive, but oh well. In just over two years I was hired at a regional. I flew a turbo prop for a year, fulfilled my contract and then went to the regional of my choice.
I've been at my current regional for just over 2 years. I'm 28 years old. I fly planes that are less then 2 years old. I average between 3,800 and 4,000 bucks a month in pay (per diem included). I have consistently had between 15 and 18 days off for over a year. I am able to get at least 7 days off in a row every month. I only fly day trips and two day trips. I see my wife every single day and we go on a trip of some sort at least once a month. She sometimes joins me on my overnights and we have a blast.
This job rules. To those of you who are choosing to walk away, all I can say is I'm sorry about your timing or the airline you chose to fly for. You should have had higher standards or you should have been more patient. Trust me, the grass IS NOT greener on the other side.
01-21-2009, 11:56 AM
#60
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Jan 2008
Posts: 1,383
Originally Posted by Ski Patrol
Woa cargo easy..... I did some research but did not realize that pilots are just pawns in the game of business. I thought they were respected/educated individuals on par with a doctor or lawyer. Once upon a time I suppose they were. Times have changed you don't see it.
Last edited by Learflyer; 01-21-2009 at 12:38 PM.
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