[jtrain609]

Originally Posted by LoadMasterC141

Sorry John gotta disagree. $19k is certainly chump change. $65K is very livable. Sorry you cannot afford a condo in the playground of the rich, but $65k IS livable. I will make around $75k this year, Well over 100 with my wife's salary added in. We have a beautiful 6 year old home, all the bells and whistles, in ground pool with a pretty waterfall etc..... Even with me shelling out $3-4K per month for flying, we still live comfortably. Before planning for a future of making jack squat for a while, I bought flat screens and Nissan Titans on a whim, and we travelled all the time.

As I said, my fiance's job doesn't travel as well as mine does. She lives in Park City, and the other option is having her drive up a snow covered canyon every day to work and to be honest with you, between the high cost of gas and the chance of her getting in a car accident making that drive, living in PC is what we're faced with. Sure she could leave her job so I could move into base, but that ain't exactly fair for her is it? So I'll work on higher pay, which we need anyways, in my current career.

This is gonna discount it all for you, but it is true: In this day and age, A person could get a loan for $60k and be in the right seat of a Regional Jet in as little as 6-8 Months. I am not saying it is right, but it is true. It took longer for me to become a certified Aircraft Loadmaster, and those bastids paid me less! Grrrrr! lol.

That person can also lawn dark an RJ pretty easily and take 50 people with them. Is that the person you want flying your wife around? We should have higher standards so not everybody can get into this career.

Your vocation and that of a doctors' is hardly comparable. Also, gotta agree with others: 10 yrs of school, and ummmm, have you heard of RESIDENCY? Know the poor noobie doctor you went to see in the ER has been awake for 18-20 hours at times. They don't make jack either. I live in a town with one of the largest teaching hospitals in the state. I have a few neighbors who are residency doctors. If Mommy and Daddy had not bought them a house, they would not be my neighbors either.

So...why do people do it? Well, I am doing it because:
1) I want something more out of life than sitting in a cubicle day in and day out, with the only excitement being a good post on Jetcareers.com. Even a night in Lubbock sounds more appetizing, and yes, I have been to Lubbock.
2) Though the beginning sucks, and there is the likelihood I will get laid off for a while at least once in my career, the end result does not look bad. In fact, let's look at someone like good 'ole Cap'n Bob for example. 3 years after starting with ExpressJet, he is a Captain, I am guessing making 65-70 per year. He averages 15-17 days off per month. Thats double what I get for $10k less. In coming years, he will make more and more, with more opportunity to get more days off.
3) I have carefully planned for the extreme reduction in pay by reducing all my debt to virtually nothing, saving money, not going deep into debt for flight training, and having a backup career/job available should something happen(9/11).
4) Oh yeah...and I love flying.

Ok here's where you've gotta understand something:

Pilots are worth nothing to start.

We are only worth what we can negotiate.

We're not worth what we'll be paid, because if they could an airline would not pay us ANYTHING to do this job. We would work for free, and under that payment convention we're worth nothing because that's what somebody is willing to pay us.

We don't go into contract negotiations with the public, so they don't matter. My contract, and my pay rate, is between me and my company. I am worth whatever I can extract from them. If you don't believe that, you don't understand the bounds of the RLA and the concepts that are present in collective bargaining. A doctor is able to say, "I'm worth X amount, and if you don't pay me that, I'll find somebody that will." We are bound by the RLA and what we, as a group, can manage to extract from the company.

Do you REALLY think an CEO is worth $20 million a year? I mean what do they do? If the CEO were fired, he can be replaced right away. If you fired all the pilots at a company you'd need 8 weeks before you could replace them, and in that period of time the company would disappear.

THAT is where we're worth something. These companies DO NOT OPERATE WITHOUT US, and that was the simple idea that John was trying to tell us with this post. Until you realize that, you'll continue to be used by whatever system you're bound by.

Don't do this job for free because you love it, because you'll realize quickly when you're in the pointy end of a jet that very little of this job is flying. It's hard to fully understand that concept until you're doing it for a living, but it is what it is. Believe me I didn't understand it until I was cruising along at 8,000' over the desert in a Chieftain, sitting on my butt thinking, "I'm not being paid to get this thing from point A to point B, anybody can do that. We're a paid insurance policy for the company to save this airframe when things start failing."