Fond du Lac students mostly fly for fun
 

Fond du Lac students mostly fly for fun

There ya go...more proof that less and less folks are interested in a career in aviation.

If you read the article it says some want to get paid to fly. There is always going to a handful of people who want to fly for fun.

Yes, and the thought preceding yours is:

"Most of them want to fly for fun..."

The year before I was hired at my current 121 gig... I instructed full time. All but one of my students were just there for recreation. Most were Boeing or Microsoft employees just there to have a good time.


The one student that I did have who wanted to fly for a living was from India. He's back there now.

Which is true. Compare the amount the private pilots vs ATP pilots.

I had 50 checkride signoffs in 4 years as a full time CFI and not one of those was an American commercial student. I had a lot of Americans who were looking for a PPL or IR and owned their own plane or were members of a flying club. I taught some Chinese commercial students going back over to China to fly. I didn't teach or even come close to teaching a single American student who wanted to be an airline pilot.

I'm not sure why the airlines didn't see that coming with 8+ year upgrade times, 20k starting salaries and constant concessionary contracts in times of profit.

That's not a problem for this financial quarter. Maybe next quarter.

Nailed it. "Long term planning" in this industry is defined as "What should we do next week?"

Did anyone catch the quote that is going to make getting paid more money in this profession difficult?

"It's pretty easy to fly an airplane once you know what you're doing," he said. "Most people think it's harder than it actually is. You're dealing in three dimensions instead of two on the ground."

What a bad quote. It's pretty easy to do most things once you know what you're doing. I've had a senior software developer and a nuclear engineer both tell me that their jobs are pretty easy once they knew what they were doing. Both of those people still make 6 figure salaries.