There are off-line instructors making $150K+ at XJT. The money's out there, just depends on what you want to put up with in terms of QOL in order to get it. I would rather spend the next 5 years in the training dept here than go to CAL/UAL/NWA, but I am doing neither because life ain't all about money.
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I agree. The only reason you ever hear people use to justify CAL is the potential money down the road. I agree with you, I'd rather make a decent living at a place I'm proud to work for than have a crappy contract with no days off for the hope of better pay.
That's retarded thinking, man. I've done the whole Trng Dept thing. After you get over the honeymoon of a new job in teaching (about a year) its like watching the paint dry in the sim day-in, day-out... enough to drive you to the edge. The only way I kept my sanity was to pepper my sim trng assignments with line flying and aircraft trng flights.And the guys making $150K/ yr... believe me, they deserve it. To pull in that kind of quan at XJT you're down to 6-8 days off per month and pulling doubles (two training sessions a day) a few days per month as well. You just can't work like that forever.
Pls don't misconstrue my comments as negativity for the joba s isntructor. I really enjoyed giving 110% for all my students. But that's just the problem. In order to be effective teaching 500 hr pilots, you have to give it your all. Keeping up that level of enthusiasm very day can be exhausting.
I don't know how some guys do it for 20+ years (although it sure was nice to be home every night) but hey, to each his own. Go ahead and try it. You'll find yourself wishing you had a way to get off the drug (the money/ the overtime) within the first year. But the pay hit will be so severe you'll just keep going. I personally think only experienced line pilot should be checkairman and then they should only be able to sim teach for 4-5 years to maintain QC for the overall product (the successful student).
Besides, the present environment at XJT won't last forever. When it the music stops, offline trng dept guys will do about $100K due to no OT. Still a respectable income. But for those who got too use to the buck-and-a-half juice, it will be a big enough pay hit when the time comes to actually hurt.
At the end of the day, nearly every major airline pilot in America had to take huge pay cuts and start all over to, well, start all over at a major. The pay-off is supposedly a better ticket to the dance. We'll see if that plays out to fruition. But any way you slice it, if you want to make more money in this career you'll have to leave the regionals and take that pay hit some day. Its really a case of taking the hit now, or 3-5 years down the road. Glad I got it out of the way. It was truly painful (and still is).
