Glamorous career with unglamorous pay

[swc12nap1]

To those of you who make $15K-$40K or who who are just unsatisified with their salary, how do you make both ends meet? Since piloting is not technically a full-time job, do you do anything to supplement your income at all? If yes, how?

 

[Stifler's Mom]

Have a spouse who makes more than you. Sad, but true.

The dual income makes our ends meet.

 

[uscpilot]

Since piloting is not technically a full-time job...

What????? Well maybe partially true, it consumes the same amount of time as a full time and part time put together. 50+ hours duty with 23+ flight.
The only free time is weekends, and that leaves being a prostitute or a stripper. My only customer has been my wife. pjjim, my pimp is going to kick my a$$ when he finds out she hasent been paying me. He has really been on edge with people stealing from planejobs.com.
usc

 

[bart]

Fly as a contract pilot and work a job that pays what major airline captains make.

 

[PositiveRate]

Since piloting is not technically a full-time job

You sound like the typical media troll - ill researched and generally ignorant of the facts.

Anyone who thinks being gone from your home/family 15-18+ days a month is a part time job can respectfully kiss my hardworking commuter as$.

How about you endure the years of sacrifice (no other way to put it...financial, emotional, etc etc) that it takes just to get on with a regional. College educated, professionally trained, many years of "experience", and some dumb as$ TSA agent (who is paid better than you were in your 1st year) gets to ask you to show your ID twice and take your belt off...just to make sure your safe to fly your own plane. Yeah, there's another few billion down the drain so the dumb as$ media pricks can get on CNN and tell us we're all safer. Money well spent while our grandmothers can't get the healthcare they need and our kids our getting fatter and dumber by the day.

I'd love to have one of these media morons in the jumpseat on the korey2 into LGA during a winter storm with expected holding, 40+knot winds on landing, icy runways, and no gate space when/if we land (God forbid they get to see a divert or a go-around- they'd think we were heros). Those articles would stop.

So, for anyone who thinks this job has "become almost entirely automated" or is "technically a part-time job", merry Christmas and kiss all of our as$es because you have no clue. The only way respect will return to this profession is if we demand it.

How's that for a rant?!

 

[bobbysamd]

Huh?

Since piloting is not technically a full-time job . . . .

I beg your pardon?!?

Just so you know, as a flight instructor I put in any number of 12-14 hour days and any number of seven-days weeks to be able to get in six hours of contact time (paid hours) per day. I certainly regard a 14-hour day as a full-time job. Or else, I was a chump to put in such hours for such little pay (which, I'm sure, plenty people would say here! ).

Just a little friendly advice. Do a little research on what comprises a "duty day" for a pilot at any level. I will fast-forward to it for you. You will soon learn that pilots are typically "on duty" nine to fourteen hours a day but are paid only when they are flying, or, in the case of flight instructors, only for the time they spend with students.

 

[JohnDoe]

Hey swc12nap1:

When I was at a regional airline, I averaged anywhere between 280-340 hours of perdiem pay per month when I was a lineholder (1 hour of perdiem for each hour away from home "on the job").

Thats an average of 70-85 hours per week.

Still think it is a part-time job??

 

[HueyPilot]

Part time?

swc12nap1:

I slept in a tent at a middle-eastern airfield, flying into various garden-spot locales every other day for two months straight. On the days I wasn't flying, I was scheduling our flights and working other issues related to our flying operations.

Seemed to be pretty much a full-time job to me.

Even though pilots may not fly every day, the vast majority of us put in well over 40 hours a week on average. When we do have downtime, we spend it AT HOME, like you do when you're not out "researching" pilot payscales and "part-time" jobs.

 

[swc12nap1]

Sorry guys if I have described piloting as a 'part-time' job. Indeed I have yet to do my homework. Well, I'm really new to this field and gathering as much information as possible before changing my career to aviation. Again, no offense. Thanks.

 

[Foobar]

Its ok, its easy to assume that the job is a part time one when you look at the part time pay, but thats not the case, its full time work with part time pay.

Here is how people do it.

1) Convince yourself there is a brass ring to be had at the end. Mesa and a few other places are seeing to it that the brass ring is melted and sold to pay for beer for mgmt.

2) Get a rich dad that will put you up in a hotel and pay for your food for two months while you go to training.

3) If you don't have a rich dad try, and get a wife who will pay the bills for you.

4) If you have no rich daddy or a wife to subsidize you, then you can live in a box while in training. Shower at a the YMCA and use food stamps to buy food.

As for me, well I've got a wife paying the bills. I don't want it bad enough so it looks like this time next year I'll be working at a desk, but there is always a glimmer of hope.

Thanks again all you morons that paid for a first officer job, paid 40K to get a job with ASA or took a regional job that paid 18K for year one, 20K for year two and 23K for year three. Yeah, you got ahead!

I'd also like to thank the instructors that fly twins for free and FBO co-pilots that fly for free. Good job guys!

I think I'm having anger issues, its time to get off the board.