If you want to be precise about it...
sleepy said:
They didn't say "airline pilot", they said "airplane pilot". You might want to read the post more closely next time. That pay seems about right for corporate "airplane pilots". Anyway, I report, you decide.
The article actually says "aircraft pilots", so I guess you'd need to roll in all of helo bubbas, glider pilots, etc. Also you misquoted the cited average pay, which was a whopping
$133,500. There is just no way this number is right. It sounds closer to the average of pilots flying for the majors. (Alright, we can include FEDEX and UPS with the Majors for just this once). The relevant portion of the piece is quoted below.
Just to get a better fix on what we are really making, I went and looked up the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the lastest national compensation survey (
http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncbl0658.pdf), using June 2003 data, they say that "Airplane pilots and navigators" who work full time have mean hourly earnings of $103.49 and work a mean of 22.4 hours per week. That works out to annual earnings of $120,545! Still can't believe it, but I'd sure like to get some of that action. Well enough fun with numbers, I need to get back to hunting for that $20k/year Regional FO job.
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Top Paying Jobs Overall
The jobs that pay the most require at least a four-year college degree. According to the Employment Policy Foundation, the nation's 12 top-paying jobs -- and the mean annual income reported in 2003 (the most recent year data was available) for each -- were:
Physicians and surgeons $147,000
Aircraft pilots $133,500
Chief executives $116,000
Electrical and electronic engineers $112,000
Lawyers and judges $99,800
Dentists $90,000
Pharmacists $85,500
Management analysts $84,700
Computer and information system managers $83,000
Financial analysts, managers and advisers $84,000
Marketing and sales managers $80,000
Education administrators $80,000