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Originally Posted by mooneyguy  Agreed, Please dont think I'm in anyway for low pay. Although I'm not there YET I'm doing my best to study the "way of the airline pilot" Since that is what I want to do when I grow up (haha im 39). To think about an fo making 20k and living out of a suitcase, and the expenses involved with a travelling job, sometimes I wonder if I must be nuts to even consider doing this.
I'm currently a union member (non aviation) We are in contract negotiations right now. My hope is that better negotations in the future will bring back to the airline industry what it has lost. |
Honestly man? I think we sell ourselves short. We say, "If somebody has $50,000 and 90 days ANYBODY can be an airline pilot!" But I haven't been out of the training department long, and when I was working as a trainer at an air carrier the washout rate was around 50%. Not everybody can do this, but for those of us that can I think it comes fairly easily and we throw around phrases like the one used above.
Truth be told, while what we do is easy to us, MOST OF THE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD CAN'T DO IT. We are, for the most part, smarter than the average person, better educated than the average person and more driven than the average person, but we don't want to come off as arrogant so we dumb down how complicated it is what we do. I mean think about it, what's our reaction when we see a pilot bragging about how hard is job is?
"TOOL! That freakin' ###### bag gives us all a bad name! This ain't that hard..."
I know it because I've said it myself, but I also understand after watching others try to do something that I do with seeming ease that it's not as easy as we think. We sell ourselves short, and really have nobody to blame but ourselves.