2017 W2 Earnings
01-07-2018, 06:11 AM
#242
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Nov 2013
Position: Fastest Hunk of Junk in the Galaxy
Posts: 1,657
Uh, have you ever worked a high-salary desk job? Think about what a 70 hour workweek does to your body, your mind, and your family relationships. Think about responding to work emails at the dinner table and fretting about that lawsuit while laying in bed at 3 AM.
Look, flying for a living has its downsides, but it seems to me that airline pilots don’t get paid to just fly airplanes. Flying airplanes is something rich private pilots do for fun on the weekends. What airline pilots are paid to do is to deal with the crappy part of flying — spend half the year in airport hotels, miss holidays with family, deal with passengers, and yes, accept the risk that a medical issue can cost your job.
I’m nothing more than an aspiring airline pilot, but I’m sick of pilots on this forum and elsewhere who’ve got no idea of how lucky they are to fly for a living. As a teenager in 2002 I took the advice of a jaded American pilot who discouraged me from becoming a pilot because he was tired of the post-9/11 airline industry. He’d never made his living doing anything other than flying. 16 years later, he’s making $300k flying 777s across the Pacific once a week and I’m considering throwing away a successful non-aviation career and taking a huge pay cut just to start at the bottom in professional aviation. It’s taken all this time just to re-learn what I already knew but allowed myself to be talked out of: I want to fly for a living.
I’d be much better off today if I’d taken my advice from someone who’d seen the grass on both sides and better appreciated the fact that airline pilots have it much better than the MBAs, accountants, and lawyers clawing for C-suite gigs.
Look, flying for a living has its downsides, but it seems to me that airline pilots don’t get paid to just fly airplanes. Flying airplanes is something rich private pilots do for fun on the weekends. What airline pilots are paid to do is to deal with the crappy part of flying — spend half the year in airport hotels, miss holidays with family, deal with passengers, and yes, accept the risk that a medical issue can cost your job.
I’m nothing more than an aspiring airline pilot, but I’m sick of pilots on this forum and elsewhere who’ve got no idea of how lucky they are to fly for a living. As a teenager in 2002 I took the advice of a jaded American pilot who discouraged me from becoming a pilot because he was tired of the post-9/11 airline industry. He’d never made his living doing anything other than flying. 16 years later, he’s making $300k flying 777s across the Pacific once a week and I’m considering throwing away a successful non-aviation career and taking a huge pay cut just to start at the bottom in professional aviation. It’s taken all this time just to re-learn what I already knew but allowed myself to be talked out of: I want to fly for a living.
I’d be much better off today if I’d taken my advice from someone who’d seen the grass on both sides and better appreciated the fact that airline pilots have it much better than the MBAs, accountants, and lawyers clawing for C-suite gigs.
01-07-2018, 06:23 AM
#243
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Nov 2013
Position: Fastest Hunk of Junk in the Galaxy
Posts: 1,657
I'd also like to point out to those who have been clamoring about the high salaried corporate workers and what they have to go through. Many of us in the majors had far worse than that high-paying corporate job for a pathetic pittance of the salary.
I moved 14 times in 21 years, my daughter went to 5 different schools by the time she was a sophomore in high school, my wife could never get a job or friends she could keep, I was literally thousands of miles away for 15 of the first 18 months of my son's life, when I was at home I regularly worked 70 hour weeks, was tied to my phone, and had a CAC enabled keyboard on my home computer to answer emails at all times of the day and night. And oh yeah, I got shot at occasionally and had many friends killed in both combat and training.
This is not intended as a woe is me sob story. I volunteered for what I did, much of it I hated but some of it made up the absolute best times of my life. To try and diminish what a major airline pilot earns because we're not tied to a smart phone and we get actual days off is a ridiculous line of argument. Most of us have paid some sort of dues to get to where we are, and we're worth what we earn. Even more importantly; almost none of us are from old money, we didn't get our jobs because of privilege or some old-boy network or who was in our fraternity in college -- we earned it.
I moved 14 times in 21 years, my daughter went to 5 different schools by the time she was a sophomore in high school, my wife could never get a job or friends she could keep, I was literally thousands of miles away for 15 of the first 18 months of my son's life, when I was at home I regularly worked 70 hour weeks, was tied to my phone, and had a CAC enabled keyboard on my home computer to answer emails at all times of the day and night. And oh yeah, I got shot at occasionally and had many friends killed in both combat and training.
This is not intended as a woe is me sob story. I volunteered for what I did, much of it I hated but some of it made up the absolute best times of my life. To try and diminish what a major airline pilot earns because we're not tied to a smart phone and we get actual days off is a ridiculous line of argument. Most of us have paid some sort of dues to get to where we are, and we're worth what we earn. Even more importantly; almost none of us are from old money, we didn't get our jobs because of privilege or some old-boy network or who was in our fraternity in college -- we earned it.
01-07-2018, 06:45 AM
#244
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Nov 2013
Posts: 2,756
^^Really good post, Han.
My youngest son has said that he would love to have my job....but he doesn't want to do what it took to get here. Even he realizes you don't start out as a widebody captain. Way too much hard work and difficult times to get to this position.
My youngest son has said that he would love to have my job....but he doesn't want to do what it took to get here. Even he realizes you don't start out as a widebody captain. Way too much hard work and difficult times to get to this position.
01-07-2018, 08:33 AM
#245
Strike averted!
Joined APC: Mar 2015
Position: B737
Posts: 3,821
And it seems right now is the easiest it’s been in a very long time.
01-07-2018, 08:59 AM
#246
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Sep 2011
Position: Hates Commuting
Posts: 974
My son is paid $220K/yr to work 40 hour weeks and sleep in his own bed every night. He also gets unlimited paid time off, breakfast, lunch and dinner cooked, free alcohol, massages, and hundreds of thousands of $$ in stock... and he's in his twenties. Not many airline pilots with that deal.
Are they hiring???
01-07-2018, 09:54 AM
#247
Line Holder
Joined APC: Nov 2012
Posts: 34
1) Airline employer. UAL
2) Seat. FO
3) Equipment. Guppy
4) Years of Service with company. 12+
5) How many days you worked. 204ish
6) How many overnights you had commutable 3/4 day trips
7) How many hours you blocked 883
8) How many hours did you credit 1340
9) Expected gross income 250,000
10) Extra Pay (DC, PS, etc.)
B/C 31,000
RHA/VERBA 9,190 B/C spill...1,340 UA
Profit share 27,200
Total w/o per diem. 318,730
2) Seat. FO
3) Equipment. Guppy
4) Years of Service with company. 12+
5) How many days you worked. 204ish
6) How many overnights you had commutable 3/4 day trips
7) How many hours you blocked 883
8) How many hours did you credit 1340
9) Expected gross income 250,000
10) Extra Pay (DC, PS, etc.)
B/C 31,000
RHA/VERBA 9,190 B/C spill...1,340 UA
Profit share 27,200
Total w/o per diem. 318,730
01-07-2018, 10:31 AM
#250
Gets Weekend Reserve
Joined APC: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,794
What’s wrong with peers sharing info? All this thread does is raise a bit of awareness among line pilots as to what it’s really like elsewhere.
Aside from the occasional thread drift, it’s a fantastic thread.
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