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How to figure career earnings??

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runfast

Active member
Joined
Jul 14, 2003
Posts
25
hello all,

quick, maybe obvious question....

i recently saw a post somewhere that had listed the career earnings of a a 35 yr. UPS pilot @ $13.7 million. my question is, how would one go about figuring that number and is there somewhere i could look that would compare such numbers....besides any website ran by kit darby? i looked on airlinepilotpay.com, but had no luck.

thanks in advance.
 
When dealing with liars and theives it's hard to make an accurate prediction. At Alaska Airlines, agreements get signed and then thrown out the window at the whim of the company. A 40K a year pay cut from FO's wasn't enough they need my retirement to. So I would say don't worry about it, treat flying like a part time job and keep looking for a good way out.
 
its a matter of time before the contacts at the cargo carriers start taking a cut.. In mgts eyes a UPS, FEDEX pilot is way over paided in todays going rate for pilot pay even thou the airlines in tons of trouble a pilot is a pilot whehter your at UPS or UAL and mgts will try anything to get the pay in par with the going rate
 
There are about a thousand different ways to project career earnings, but the problem is that only one of them will be accurate for you, only about a hundred of them will be close, and nobody can tell you which methods are the good ones!

Sure, there are ways to do it, but they involve either predicting the future by looking at the past (i.e. the guy retiring now after 20 years at XYZ looks like this, so you'll look like that in 20 years from now, adjusting for inflation), or guessing at the future based on the present (i.e. the current contract has a pay progression that looks like X, and assuming it keeps up with an inflation rate of Y and gets raises that look like Z and your progression looks like Q, then when you retire...). And with enough data, it's straightforward enough (not to say easy, but nothing a good accounting geek couldn't grind through in a few days) to generate predictions for every airline out there. As for how those predictions stack up against the next 20 or 30 years, well...

Who'd have predicted 5 years ago the carnage at TWA & USAir? Who'd have predicted the deaths of Eastern and Pan Am? Who'd have thought that SWA & JetBlue would be near the top of the heap today?

It's all a garbage-in/garbage-out process, and even if you have good numbers for the present state of things (a feat that Air Inc didn't always achieve), guesses about the future tend to quickly become "garbage" within a few years.

It's sort of the ultimate "Your Mileage May Vary." Good luck!
 
That figure works out to an average of $391,000 per year to age 60. Seems a little high, especially when you start at $27,000 the first year and max out in the mid 200s. Me thinks this person has included the benefits and full retirement package. Certainly something to consider, but not actual dollars in the pocket up to age 60.

TP
 

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