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Piloting career regrets?
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bigr
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I saw an interview last night on the local news with Julie Clark. she is an airshow pilot (T-34) that you've probably seen perform. very talented pilot. she just retired early from her captains chair at Northwest at age 55. the commute from Sacramento was just too much anymore. who knows what her real reasons are. but she will still be on the airshow circuit.
after 20 years as a captain she gave the following advice to aspiring pilots: "Get started early".
as a tragic side-note, her father was an airline captain that was killed when a psychotic passenger took over the plane he was flying and crashed it deliberately (in 1964), killing all on board. sound familiar?
after 20 years as a captain she gave the following advice to aspiring pilots: "Get started early".
as a tragic side-note, her father was an airline captain that was killed when a psychotic passenger took over the plane he was flying and crashed it deliberately (in 1964), killing all on board. sound familiar?
I would say that both doctors and airline pilots have seen their professions erode but when it is all said and done the medical field will be much more lucrative and rewarding. I hate to say it but I think pilots have done more to ruin our profession in the last few years than just about any other group of professionals in this country. Just do the math of a typical newcomer.
Four years at UND/Riddle-----70K?
Two years flight instructing-----10-20/flight hour (roughly 15k/year)
Two years as a regional FO------(14-30k/year)
Two years possibly the rest of your career as Reg. Cap ----(45k-85k)
Of course some guys get there quicker, but the average aviation puke can expect to hit the big time and make the coveted position of reserve captain at a regional airline around 8-10 years after beginning college. Quicker if you go to a bottom-feeding regional. Plan on being gone 60% of the time, more if you are a commuter. Once you do get that upgrade you'll see your salary skyrocket to the 60k range.
Seems to me like four years of med school looks pretty good. I've never heard of doctors being furloughed, agreeing to work for minimum wage to gain "experience", or having to start over at the bottom because their hospital went under due to competition from the "low cost hospitals" aka LCH's. I've also rarely heard doctors complain about other doctors making too much money..."can't stand those surgeon pigs pulling in 250k/year, who do they think they are trying to make this a good job" You will hear statements like that daily within the pilot ranks. I know I've been rambling (reserve is rotting my brain) but I would recommend you go to med school, buy an airplane and a set of epaulets when you can afford it and go knock yourself out. Just make sure you find a new flight instructor to ride along and keep you safe. I guarantee he/she will do it for free to build some more "complex time."
Four years at UND/Riddle-----70K?
Two years flight instructing-----10-20/flight hour (roughly 15k/year)
Two years as a regional FO------(14-30k/year)
Two years possibly the rest of your career as Reg. Cap ----(45k-85k)
Of course some guys get there quicker, but the average aviation puke can expect to hit the big time and make the coveted position of reserve captain at a regional airline around 8-10 years after beginning college. Quicker if you go to a bottom-feeding regional. Plan on being gone 60% of the time, more if you are a commuter. Once you do get that upgrade you'll see your salary skyrocket to the 60k range.
Seems to me like four years of med school looks pretty good. I've never heard of doctors being furloughed, agreeing to work for minimum wage to gain "experience", or having to start over at the bottom because their hospital went under due to competition from the "low cost hospitals" aka LCH's. I've also rarely heard doctors complain about other doctors making too much money..."can't stand those surgeon pigs pulling in 250k/year, who do they think they are trying to make this a good job" You will hear statements like that daily within the pilot ranks. I know I've been rambling (reserve is rotting my brain) but I would recommend you go to med school, buy an airplane and a set of epaulets when you can afford it and go knock yourself out. Just make sure you find a new flight instructor to ride along and keep you safe. I guarantee he/she will do it for free to build some more "complex time."
Timebuilder
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Your doc was Dr. McCauley and his son Mike. Mike is a good guy but he has had his share of problems.Flying for a living is tough. My recomendation.1)Never get married.2) Get one of those freight containers insulate it an put a pot stove in it.3)You can live in it on a far dark corner of the airport.When you base changes you just shove it in the back of the airplane and move to the next base.Move around the world and taste all the erotic and exotic stuff, get it out of your system. Next come back get married then settle in with some nice little scheduled airline like Airtran..enjoy life.
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AA717driver
A simpler time...
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The medical profession is eroding just like the aviation profession or the truck driving profession or...
Name your poison--globalization, NAFTA whatever, jobs aren't what they used to be.
My bottom line(getting furloughed after 15 years at a major) is all I've ever wanted to do is fly. I don't want my own business. I don't want to squeeze someone's balls and tell them to cough. I don't want to write software so some couch potato can kill bad guys.
If you are driven to be a pilot, do it. Anything else will not make you happy. If this is a coin flip or you are looking for the biggest W-2, do something else.
Good luck.TC
Name your poison--globalization, NAFTA whatever, jobs aren't what they used to be.
My bottom line(getting furloughed after 15 years at a major) is all I've ever wanted to do is fly. I don't want my own business. I don't want to squeeze someone's balls and tell them to cough. I don't want to write software so some couch potato can kill bad guys.
If you are driven to be a pilot, do it. Anything else will not make you happy. If this is a coin flip or you are looking for the biggest W-2, do something else.
Good luck.TC
This is what I'd ask myself.
If you enjoy medicine and it will fulfill you - go to med school.
(I haven't heard anyone mention the nice chunk of debt you'll ring up for that PFT - calculate that - and liability insur. into the big bucks you'll be making after school/clinicals)
If you enjoy flying and it will fulfill you - fly
If you want money and it fulfills you - be a personal claims attorney.
In this case between medicine and aviation - you both pay your dues. Neither is a path to getting rich fast.
For me, money is not the driving factor. I've got an engineering degree - but absolutely no desire to make it my life's work. Flying is what I want to do - and I'll take the lemons with the lemonade.
Bottom line - do what makes you happy. If you aren't happy, then really - what's the F'ing point?
If you enjoy medicine and it will fulfill you - go to med school.
(I haven't heard anyone mention the nice chunk of debt you'll ring up for that PFT - calculate that - and liability insur. into the big bucks you'll be making after school/clinicals)
If you enjoy flying and it will fulfill you - fly
If you want money and it fulfills you - be a personal claims attorney.
In this case between medicine and aviation - you both pay your dues. Neither is a path to getting rich fast.
For me, money is not the driving factor. I've got an engineering degree - but absolutely no desire to make it my life's work. Flying is what I want to do - and I'll take the lemons with the lemonade.
Bottom line - do what makes you happy. If you aren't happy, then really - what's the F'ing point?
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Typhoon1244
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flywithastick
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First, get a degree in something useful (1 - business, 2 - medical, 3 - engineering/science).
Second, go fly, OR get into some business for yourself. Working for someone else is not the secure, financially rewarding prospect it was a generation ago.
From an employees perspective, the corporate world is decaying day by day. Job security is essentially non existent in the avg *profitable* Fortune 500 corporation. You have no greater (and sometimes less) security than the avg contractor.
You get a new manager and he/she brings in their cronies from the previous assignment - you are then a target. The chiefs say reduce overhead 30% to offset a *predicted* or *possible* downturn... you're then a target. Someone figures out a way to outsource your services to *India*, you're a target. and so on...
Anyone who tries to tell someone to go the conservative route of corporate America has not been in this environment during the last 10-15 years. I was given very sincere advice to go this route (versus the very volitile route of a commercial pilot) when I was in school. It's not secure any longer, and a career change now would be horribly difficult at best with kids and debt.
Intense global competition, immigration problems, etc. have taken all comfort out of a 9-5 job (in this manufacturing industry). Don't think this is the easy-trucking route it may have once been.
Second, go fly, OR get into some business for yourself. Working for someone else is not the secure, financially rewarding prospect it was a generation ago.
From an employees perspective, the corporate world is decaying day by day. Job security is essentially non existent in the avg *profitable* Fortune 500 corporation. You have no greater (and sometimes less) security than the avg contractor.
You get a new manager and he/she brings in their cronies from the previous assignment - you are then a target. The chiefs say reduce overhead 30% to offset a *predicted* or *possible* downturn... you're then a target. Someone figures out a way to outsource your services to *India*, you're a target. and so on...
Anyone who tries to tell someone to go the conservative route of corporate America has not been in this environment during the last 10-15 years. I was given very sincere advice to go this route (versus the very volitile route of a commercial pilot) when I was in school. It's not secure any longer, and a career change now would be horribly difficult at best with kids and debt.
Intense global competition, immigration problems, etc. have taken all comfort out of a 9-5 job (in this manufacturing industry). Don't think this is the easy-trucking route it may have once been.
Stifler's Mom
MILF...MILF...MILF
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huncowboy
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TurboS7 said:
You got the T-shirt. It was him. I was sure someone was going to figure it out. Good old guy by the way. I will keep using his service until I am out of FL.
He kept asking me who is on the dollar bill, next who is on the twenty etc... and I could not figure any of them out. I probably ended up in his “dumb European immigrant” folder. I told him like three times that I am a foreigner LOL plus I never ever carry cash on me anyways. But he did not give me a break. He was quizzing the whole office plus a vendor who was trying to sell some medical supplies. She did not know it either LOL.
This and the story about not becoming a doc took like 50% of the total time spent on me of this whole 1st class examination. Still I was out in 30 min. Normally in FL you don't even get into an examination room within 45 min if you have an appointment. Kudos to Doc McCauley just for that!!!
Typhoon1244
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A few years ago I looked up registries of airplanes I've flown, and something like half of them have been destroyed. I sat down and began to add up lists of friends, co-workers, and associates I've know who have been killed in airplanes, and stopped when I the numbers became too many to dwell on. I've flown from cold muddy scratches in the ground, been baked in cockpits so hot I couldn't hardly see for all the sweat, for months on end. I've had fires, structural failures, hydraulic failures, explosions on board, a right-seat rider with a heart attack, pneumatic failures, gear failures, control failures, instrument failures, electrical losses, failures, and fires, and a host of other experiences over the years.
No man lives who has enough cash to buy those experiences, nor could I trade them if such a person might exist. They're mine, and I value them for what I have learned about my craft, and most of all, about myself.
I have watched pilots die. I have put out burning airplanes. I have sifted through my priorities as I struggled for memory in intensive care following a parachute failure and an impact with a very unforgiving cliff. This past year I watched over and over the death of five more associates and co-workers whom I knew, with whom I'd flown, in airplanes I'd flown and knew well. Five more names added to a long silent list.
I've been separated from my kids for ten months at a stretch, denied the chance to see them learning to walk or talk. I've lived out of airplanes, lived in hangars, slept underwings and in cockpits. I've gone years with unending cuts on my fingers and hands and arms from safety wire and aluminum, burns on my knuckles from hot exhausts and bleed ducts, working on airplanes. I have fond memories of being eaten alive by mosquitoes during all night cylinder changing sessions, or of standing frozen on a tall ladder, lashed to an engine in 40 knot winds in freezing climates while trying to be meticulous about every detail on that engine.
I've seen the underside of powerlines as I slid under them, unable to go over (or unwilling to take the risk), and the topside of thunderstorms that hurled about more power than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I've been knocked unconsious in an airplane, burned by one, run over by another. One hand doesn't move the same as the other after being broken and cut in an engine compartment at a time and place when medical help wasn't in the cards. My hearing has adapted to it's environment, it isn't the same as it was. Too much loud noise, too much vibration.
I've been sick in chemical as it's been sprayed on crops, sick in MEK while working on an airplane. Sick from fever while turning wrenches in the dead of winter on a job that just had to get out...miserable for the condition, but grateful for the work.
Any regrets? None, yet. Only that one day it will end.
Pick your poison.
No man lives who has enough cash to buy those experiences, nor could I trade them if such a person might exist. They're mine, and I value them for what I have learned about my craft, and most of all, about myself.
I have watched pilots die. I have put out burning airplanes. I have sifted through my priorities as I struggled for memory in intensive care following a parachute failure and an impact with a very unforgiving cliff. This past year I watched over and over the death of five more associates and co-workers whom I knew, with whom I'd flown, in airplanes I'd flown and knew well. Five more names added to a long silent list.
I've been separated from my kids for ten months at a stretch, denied the chance to see them learning to walk or talk. I've lived out of airplanes, lived in hangars, slept underwings and in cockpits. I've gone years with unending cuts on my fingers and hands and arms from safety wire and aluminum, burns on my knuckles from hot exhausts and bleed ducts, working on airplanes. I have fond memories of being eaten alive by mosquitoes during all night cylinder changing sessions, or of standing frozen on a tall ladder, lashed to an engine in 40 knot winds in freezing climates while trying to be meticulous about every detail on that engine.
I've seen the underside of powerlines as I slid under them, unable to go over (or unwilling to take the risk), and the topside of thunderstorms that hurled about more power than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I've been knocked unconsious in an airplane, burned by one, run over by another. One hand doesn't move the same as the other after being broken and cut in an engine compartment at a time and place when medical help wasn't in the cards. My hearing has adapted to it's environment, it isn't the same as it was. Too much loud noise, too much vibration.
I've been sick in chemical as it's been sprayed on crops, sick in MEK while working on an airplane. Sick from fever while turning wrenches in the dead of winter on a job that just had to get out...miserable for the condition, but grateful for the work.
Any regrets? None, yet. Only that one day it will end.
Pick your poison.
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Weasil
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Go to Med School. Now, at age 50, I realize how much smarter my parents and my grandparents were when they told me almost 30 years ago to go to Med School. My grandfather even offerred to pay for my Med School. And my college grades were good enough that I could have got in.
But, no, after 4 years of college, I was smarter than my parents and grandparents, tired of school and just wanted to fly airplanes and chase girls. I still do the former; my wife objects to the latter.
And I realize that if I'd gone to Med School, I'd be owning my own King Air or Citation now, instead of the Cherokee.
Go to Med School.
But, no, after 4 years of college, I was smarter than my parents and grandparents, tired of school and just wanted to fly airplanes and chase girls. I still do the former; my wife objects to the latter.
And I realize that if I'd gone to Med School, I'd be owning my own King Air or Citation now, instead of the Cherokee.
Go to Med School.
Typhoon1244
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