hindsight2020
Yeah Buddy
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2004
- Posts
- 235
Hi folks
I like to spend my friday afternoons dwelling on the realization that I lucked out with being born with the passion for something that can't pay the bills (aviation). So I was looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics of our good ol' Uncle Sam and I would like to invite you all to take a look at those numbers, see if you can make some sense out of them.
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes532012.htm
The link above is for the commercial pilot designation, I welcome all to browse over the rest of the numbers under "Transportation and Material Moving Occupations". That's the employment category where all pilot occupations can be found.
They have flight instructors and all other flying gigs except airline pilot under the COMMERCIAL PILOT designation and they DO make the disclaimer that self-employed people are not figured in the statistic. According to them, with the most recent data they figured, the MEAN annual wage is $58,720. I said, "the mean doesn't sound too bad", since the few high-paying jobs throw the average up a little. But then I look at the median information, the real important one, and was shocked to see that they list $51,000 as the MEDIAN ANNUAL. I about fell off my chair! All of this with them arguing a RSE (relative standard error) of 2.5%!!!! Are you sh$tting me?!?! This ain't the usual salary.com suspect, using airline flight instructor wage salaries to generalize to all CFI's, we are talking about the freggin' govt data!
Now, the 19,940 total employment for this occupation category seems offly low, so that might have something to do with it, since I know there are more than 20,000 of us starving aviators out there; Jesus everytime I take out the trash and tell the dumpster man I'm getting my CFI he tells me he got his too!
Plus, the lowest 10% bracket salary figure is also a joke, $26,880....another over-the-chair-experience to that one, so far the best employement opportunity for a CFI I've been able to uncover is a salaried position at a university quoting a salaried $1750/mo. I about got a hard-on just hearing that, while at the same time, of course, my parents mocked me and showed their dissapointment at my 'welfare' job aspirations when I should be pursuing the engineering job they made me get the degree for... and that's a quote folks. Everytime I tell my fellow flying beggars about that number [the 1750/mo CFI job]they all agree, that right there is top 1% on the scale of employment outlook for any CFI who's not a 20 yr veteran of course hehe.
Either I really have no access to a fair compensation job in this country no matter how much I educate myself, or Uncle Sam has gotten into the webspace advertisement business and just punched numbers into the database. But of course this is from the same people who bring you "unemployment is DOWN!" chants by advising you that there was an increase in hiring for month B while they omit the fact that the increased hiring doesn't begin to compensate for the job losses of month A and the 3 months before that LMFAO...so I guess I was warned. comments welcome!
Happy flying folks
I like to spend my friday afternoons dwelling on the realization that I lucked out with being born with the passion for something that can't pay the bills (aviation). So I was looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics of our good ol' Uncle Sam and I would like to invite you all to take a look at those numbers, see if you can make some sense out of them.
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes532012.htm
The link above is for the commercial pilot designation, I welcome all to browse over the rest of the numbers under "Transportation and Material Moving Occupations". That's the employment category where all pilot occupations can be found.
They have flight instructors and all other flying gigs except airline pilot under the COMMERCIAL PILOT designation and they DO make the disclaimer that self-employed people are not figured in the statistic. According to them, with the most recent data they figured, the MEAN annual wage is $58,720. I said, "the mean doesn't sound too bad", since the few high-paying jobs throw the average up a little. But then I look at the median information, the real important one, and was shocked to see that they list $51,000 as the MEDIAN ANNUAL. I about fell off my chair! All of this with them arguing a RSE (relative standard error) of 2.5%!!!! Are you sh$tting me?!?! This ain't the usual salary.com suspect, using airline flight instructor wage salaries to generalize to all CFI's, we are talking about the freggin' govt data!
Now, the 19,940 total employment for this occupation category seems offly low, so that might have something to do with it, since I know there are more than 20,000 of us starving aviators out there; Jesus everytime I take out the trash and tell the dumpster man I'm getting my CFI he tells me he got his too!
Plus, the lowest 10% bracket salary figure is also a joke, $26,880....another over-the-chair-experience to that one, so far the best employement opportunity for a CFI I've been able to uncover is a salaried position at a university quoting a salaried $1750/mo. I about got a hard-on just hearing that, while at the same time, of course, my parents mocked me and showed their dissapointment at my 'welfare' job aspirations when I should be pursuing the engineering job they made me get the degree for... and that's a quote folks. Everytime I tell my fellow flying beggars about that number [the 1750/mo CFI job]they all agree, that right there is top 1% on the scale of employment outlook for any CFI who's not a 20 yr veteran of course hehe.
Either I really have no access to a fair compensation job in this country no matter how much I educate myself, or Uncle Sam has gotten into the webspace advertisement business and just punched numbers into the database. But of course this is from the same people who bring you "unemployment is DOWN!" chants by advising you that there was an increase in hiring for month B while they omit the fact that the increased hiring doesn't begin to compensate for the job losses of month A and the 3 months before that LMFAO...so I guess I was warned. comments welcome!
Happy flying folks
