Airline Pilots: Is Anybody Interested in Being One?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

7. Interesting. And consistent with what I'd been hearing

when I was working in a major airline's training department (I'm also retired now). An awful lot of pilots don't want their kids to follow in their footsteps because being an airline pilot just isn't what it used to be. Many have had to take deep pay cuts and/or have lost their pensions, and with all the bankruptcies, mergers and reorganizations lately the stability isn't there any more.

Additionally, the cost of becoming a pilot has become incredibly high: about $200 an hour just for primary flight training in a single-engine airplane. If you go to one of the college aviation programs like ERAU or UND, you'll graduate with a crushing debt comparable to medical school, only to qualify for a job at a regional airline that pays about $20K a year to start. I know a guy who graduated from one of those programs and is making $800/month student loan payments, and will have to do so for years and years. On a regional pilot salary. And if he ends up at a major airline someday, he still won't have the kind of stability that a pilot used to have. He might be furloughed or lose seniority in a merger; he might have to commute for hours or move to an unaffordable base like JFK. And still stuck with a ginormous student loan.

So who wants to go into aviation any more? Unless you or your family has buckets of money, you probably can't afford it, so you go into another line of work where you can afford to live well and fly recreationally. Maybe the reason the email writer is seeing so many lazy, unmotivated tools is that they are the wealthy, entitled children of the 1% who are used to skating through school on Daddy's money instead of the kids who wanted so badly to be pilots that they'd wash airplanes at the FBO in exchange for flight lessons. Can't do that any more.

I don't fly any more at all myself because I can't afford it - and it's really hard to find a job as a CFI (so someone else pays for my flying) because people can't afford flying lessons at $200/hour. Half the flight schools in my area have gone out of business in the last 5 years or so.

It will be interesting to see what the new 1500-hour rule does to the industry.