Unless you're over 29, you still can.

This career will be over in 30 years. If you think you will be in a cockpit making $$$$ and working 12 days a month by then, sorry but it is a pipe dream.


Artificial Inteligence will happen. You can deny it as much as you want.

And 50-60 years ago, people thought we'd all be in flying cars by now.

We'll see military UAVs using AI for YEARS before it gets anywhere close to an airplane hauling around passengers. Think about it - even subways & trains (which are far less riskier than airplanes) have an operator. And you think in 2039 airplanes will be flying around without anybody up front?

I understand how the industry can make people pessimistic...but the rumors of aviation's demise have been (and are being) greatly exaggerated...

If I had taken the class date offer from Mesa instead of TSA, I would just be getting furloughed now instead of last July. Since Lakes is no longer hiring, I'd have no flying prospects and would be out on the street. So maybe it's good that I chose TSA, maybe not. At the same time, if Lakes didn't hire me, I would probably be in class for ATC and have a better outlook. It's all a roll of the dice and you can't predict how this stuff is going to go. I wish mostly all of you the best of luck, but I disagree that you should blame yourself for the way your career has gone...unless you've failed checkrides or busted regs or something.

The only thing that will kill this career is a human teleporter

Ummmmmmm.......sure.

Yeah, what he said!

The next big push will be aircraft managed by a single on-board pilot with a remote ground-based pilot backing up several flights at the same time.

The best software reliability is around 99%, so a completely automated plane would error about 1% of the time. Which is several million dead passengers a year. Automation......not going to happen in our lifetimes. Remote controlled maybe, but that is far more expensive to maintain than pilots.

Blah, blah, blah. . . Aside from the military, how do we best prepare and increase our qualifications for a job with the majors? We eagerly await your words of wisdom Yoda.

I call bull on this. This is far too complicated a study to assign such a blanket % to it. I'd guess that reliability of a computer system (especially redundant systems) would far surpass a human's ability in terms of error detection and correction. The number of systems we're operating through as things exist right now would mean that to apply your statement, we'd lose millions of passengers a year. Just because two pilots are sitting in the cockpit of the Airbus doesn't mean the computers aren't doing the actual work - that is a fly by wire airplane.

If you've flown an ERJ, you'd be familiar with all the electrical system safeties built in that automatically follow the logic outside of the pilot's control when problems arise. What are pilots trained to do? We wait for messages to appear on the EICAS and pull out a book and push the buttons that it says to push when it says to push them. Since the computer is already detecting the problem and posting the message, why not have it follow the steps in the QRH in a matter of seconds?

I don't think pilots are going anywhere anytime soon, but do not think for a second that the trend isn't anything other than removing more and more from our control.