jaflapilot

Hey Guys,
Long story short, we all know things aren't looking so good for professional pilots the foreseeable future. I'm interested in going back to school for an engineering degree. Does anyone on here have an engineering degree or know someone who does? This is a field that I don't know much about but it greatly interests me and I have read that it can be quite lucrative. Feel free to PM me.

AirWillie

Yep. You know it's bad when your Dads neighbor at another state who is a major CA wants to get a hold of you to tell you to get out while you're still young............. Good luck.

BlueMoon

My bro is working on his masters and interning out at Lockheed for the summer. It is pretty competitive but sounds like it pay off. You better be good at math and using computers. I looked at a book for a math class he was taking at some point during undergrad. It looked like I picked up a book written in a foreign language.

Airfix

I went from being a 15 year aerospace engineer to being an FO at a regional but luckily I still work as a consultant engineer to keep some money coming in. I have a pretty good perspective and have been an FO at one of the lower echelon regional carriers for 2 years.

Engineering school is difficult and you'll spend most of your college time studying rather than partying unless you are very gifted. You need to have a natural ability for maths and physics. You also have to like working on problems because you'll be doing it the rest of your career. You need to be able to write detailed technical reports (just finished a 150 page report I did on the road) and be able to communicate effectively with peers, seniors and non engineering types.

I ended up being one of the senior engineers in very large international aerospace company that has a great engineering reputation. The job was great, with each day, month and year presenting new problems and opportunities. It was however hard work especially when you start being project leader and have other engineers and draftsmen working for you. Days can be long. At the height of the 787 design work I was doing I was working 70+ hours a week. Granted this was only for 3 or 4 months but it takes its toll. When you are a lead engineer the job never leaves you. I'd think about designs and projects all the time, some of best ideas came while I was doing something unrelated. The pressure can be high to get a job out on time and to budget. If it goes behind budget or the schedule slips you are in the firing line. I'd find myself giving up weekends to go in and work for free (on salary) just to make deadlines. The rewards are good though. After 15 years I was making about $85,000 per year with 5 weeks of vacation. I'd never worked a christmas, 4th of july, presidents day, memorial day or my birthday. Seeing and now flying aircraft with systems I have seen from conception, design, manufacture, test and qualification is quite staisfying.

I left becuase I had pretty much reached the top of my pay scale without going into management or moving to Seattle or Toulouse. Something I have no desire to do. I have always been a flyer and started flying at 16 years old. I decided I needed a new challenge that would pay about the same or more money than engineering and give me more flexibility and allow me to 'live the dream'. To be honest the dream is a bit of a nightmare and not at all how I expected my life to turn out. However I am hopefull. I can see that job at Delta where I am making $100k and working 14 days a month. That's what stops me going back to engineering full time.

The other fact about being an FO is compared to engineering it is easy. Oh, it definately has its moments but for the most part it is a cake walk compared to engineering. When you are done flying you can switch off. When you walk out the cockpit you have no other obligation, this is not the case with engineering. You spend more time away from home as a pilot but you spend significantly more time at work as an engineer, going to the same cubicle day in and day out year after year, seeing the same people and the same place every day.

As an engineer you have no flexibility with schedule. 9-5 monday through friday and many weekends. If you need a wednesday afternoon off then it comes out of your vacation bank. If the skiing is good and you want a few days off, it comes out your vacation bank. Very soon there is not enough vacation to do everything I wanted to do. Where I am in my flying career I have not got the flexibility YET but I know it will come as will the money. I only have 1 week of vacation but so far this year I have managed to take 3 week long vacations without spending any of my vacation bank.

Engineering is a great job, difficult, stressful but very rewarding, home every night with adequate money.

Flying sucks to begin with but has potential to allow you to make more money and have more time off than engineering.

If you are sure you are getting out of flying then engineering is a great career to get into however there will never be the money in engineering as there is in law, medicine or accounting. Don't become an engineer for the money, because it's not as lucrative as you think, do it for the enjoyment.

PM me if you need any more.

Airfix

jaflapilot

Airfix,
Thank you so much for taking the time to write your great post. It really gave me some good insight and you did a superb job of describing the lifestyle and work environment of an engineer. I really appreciate it.

Cubdriver

Nice post, Airfix. I worked for a major bizjet manufacturer as an engineer for several years in a junior role and I concur with everything you say about the nature of that kind of work. I left only because of layoffs. It was rewarding having an effect on new airplanes. I generally enjoyed the work although it was very dull at times. At the junior level, engineering work is strongly team-oriented, so you do not have sole ownership of very much of what you produce or come up with. Your work is checked and rechecked by others so many times that you will be at best a team player in a team effort. That can be fun as well, and I produced many ideas that found play in the final version. But in the end it is not a very personal job and little of what you do is identifiable as yours. You have to identify with the company and the product.

I then took a fulltime flying job mostly to build flight time for use in subsequent engineering work. I agree with your thoughts there too. There are quite a few aero and mechanical engineers working as pilots where I work, even being a small company. They left the office mainly because they wanted to fly more and have more time off. But the pay is very low, far lower than even entry-level engineering, and I find that it saps my self-esteem to be making so little with my background. If you decide to fly fulltime be aware that your self-esteem may come partly from being well-paid, and when you get into flying you will have less than half of that. It is particularly hard for formerly well-paid persons to make the switch. In flying we take half of our pay in landings, takeoffs, adventure, and travel.

Both jobs are great in some ways and I value both experiences. Perhaps the best solution is to alternate between them, valuing each for what it does.

FighterHayabusa

Aerospace Engineering can be almost as cyclical as piloting, so I wouldn't limit yourself. You can get a Computer Science, or any vaguely mechanical or computer related engineering degree and work at any of those places, especially since they love people with piloting experience. Then you can work in another industry if you want if you're ever part of a mass layoff. Software contract work can be very lucrative in aerospace engineering ($60-$80 / hr for 60+ hrs a week when it comes down to a year before cert time), but you've got to put in several years as an employee first and be willing to go where the jobs are several times in your career.
People that excel in engineering usually have hobbies writing their own game mods, building their own guitar amps (and then never playing them) or posting one liners on slashdot... Is this you?

Airfix

Cub driver I agree. You are very correct in the early years as an engineer you are part of a larger team and usually on work only a very small detail of the larger project. I also do agree that it can become mundane but for me the early years was all about learning from my peers and seniors and that learning takes a long time. This made it interesting to me but it will definately depend on the company you are with.

Actually like all jobs the company you work for makes a huge difference in the quality of the job. I was lucky in my early career I got into a great part of the company working on development and design of new gas turbines. However I later specialized and got sent here to the USA to a smaller subsidiary but more specialized part of the company. With the transition to the smaller group within a larger group I became a bigger fish in a smaller pond. I noticed that being part of a team in a large company is very very different to being part of a team in a small company.

The large company is a good place to learn the skills you need as you have support from many areas and there are experts in everything that you can depend upon and learn from. I think I would have got frustrated by staying in that division for the later part of my engineering career because respinsibility it diluted with size of the group. In the small company you are given many of responsibilities that would have been farmed out to other departments in a large company. When I got to the smaller division I was was responsible for bearing design, stress analysis, lube systems, structures and pretty much everything to do with the design that would have had it's own department in the larger division. As lead I also worked with quality, manufacturing and test engineers working in what is called an Integrated Product Team. I got to see the whole picture from the intial spec through to the completion of test and first flight. I felt my job was a lot more satisfying in the smaller comany experiencing many things and having many responsibilities.

I hope in the long run to be able to combine my flying and engineering into something, maybe air crash investigation, maybe test flying I'm not sure. Both careers are wonderful and I don't plan to give up either one anytime soon.

bryris

One side effect you must learn to deal with as a professional pilot is that you can offer nothing unique. There is no way to have your name become synonymous with a particular end goal that others value. A pilot at the top of his game can do nothing more than continually relocate the aircraft and its contents around the country/world uneventfully. As noble as this is in reality, there is a seemingly endless sea of pilots that run up against the same exact maximum performance standard and can do no more.

In other professions, (certainly not all, but many - and even more so in the realm of self employment), you can build a reputation for yourself as the "go to" guy to get X done. You can develop and foster a unique set of skills to differentiate yourself from others by specializing in certain areas and building a portfolio of satisfied clients in your wake. Word of mouth gets around and your phone is ringing with people wanting your services, not the pilot's plight of searching disparately for a place to be needed. Being sought after versus seeking for could be the distilled down primary difference.

I think more than even pay, the self-esteem issue would likely be centered around being treated akin to a grocery store bag boy. Being rerouted at the company's whim, juniored for more work at the end of a 4-day, doctor's notes needed after calling in sick (in many cases), and otherwise being treated as nothing but a number, a piece of putty to be molded and smashed into the leaky holes on crew scheduling's sole determination.

Going from a being treated and regarded as a professional to being treated as employee #xxxxx is more of a self esteem supressor than the pay issue, though that adds fuel to the fire.

Airfix

Very true Bryris and a good point that I failed to articulate. After only 2 years I already feel like that little.