They probably won't bother to furlough much less than 10%... too much overhead cost due to cascading training events on both ends (furlough and recall). They also don't usually furlough for less than three years.

20% has historically been pretty safe, unless an airline is in a death spiral to oblivion.

Forty years ago when I started, an old UAL captain adised, “don’t buy anything that you can’t eat or fit in a compact car until well established”. Still good advise.

GF

You really need to go get some flight experience while keeping your current job. The economy and aviation future is irrelevant since at this point you only think you'd enjoy being a pilot.

Start putting the time in to the books, hands on flying is the fun part of the job but also a small portion. Do you enjoy keeping up on regulation changes, operating manual updates? Do you enjoy taking on responsibility for other peoples safety? How do you handle the pressure of a pass/fail check ride, are you ready for a check ride every 6 months for many many years, etc, etc?

Go get your license, then decide do you really want to do it the next 30yrs or just occasionally for fun.

The key is to keep your job while you do this. Then you won't fall on to a moving treadmill and just keep going if you're not passionate about it. To many people dive in then stick it out when they shouldn't because they don't want to admit to themselves they made a bad choice. If you keep your job while you get your PPL, you can easily walk away with loosing less money than you'd loose buying a new loaded pickup truck.

Hope that helps.

That's a good policy for anyone starting out in life. Trust me, it's another way of saying freedom.

Absolutely. The plan as of right now is to get my PPL. Re-evaluate whether this seems to be something I want to do as a career or not. If yes, then proceed with my the rest of my training. If no, then I will just have my PPL.

I went ahead and got my 1st class medical just to make sure there were no surprises with that up front. The flight school near me uses king schools for their ground schooling. I have started going through the program and have my 1st flight lesson scheduled for 5/10/19.

If I do decide to try and make aviation a career, I plan on doing all of my training while working full-time at my current job (Project Manager in Construction Management). I definitely appreciate the notion of living below ones means and saving money. I try to practice this as much as possible (Limit purchases, bring lunch from home, etc.) and try to help my wife understand that we need to save as much $$ as possible and to not put so much value into material things.

I know 100% I do not want to stay in my current role. I have done different career test online, had a career/life coach etc. trying to figure out "my path". Flying was pretty much the only thing that we came up with for me to pursue. We will see what happens.

Thanks for everyone's input!

Good thread, as someone that's 49, has always had a passion for aviation, and considering a late career change as well.