kevin18

Your communication was horrible because you absolutely implied you had flown with him. Anyone with reasonable reading comprehension would have come to the same conclusion.

Cleared4appch

This right here ^^^^. Hit the hail on the head. I’m a millennial and I’ve never watched many of these “fly with Mr. Awesome” vids but on the few occasions that I do, I cringe every time. When I was growing up, myself and others around my age got addicted to flying by reading flying magazines, going to the local airport and talking to pilots in person, talking to the pilots on the flight deck while deplaning, going and watching airplanes at the big international airport nearby, etc. etc. etc. Nobody browsed the internet endlessly watching YouTube vids.

Obviously YouTube didn’t exist when I was growing up, but we still found a way to get after it and make it happen if flying was what we really wanted to do, even when we didn’t have the latest ‘influencer channels.’ It’s so damn cringe. And what’s worse, is they don’t even realize how cringe they are. Totally oblivious to it. When I ask others what got them interested/started in aviation, they almost always say it was through someone they knew or met who was a pilot, or they knew someone else that knew someone who was a pilot. Usually it progressed to taking a discovery flight from there once they did more research. I never really hear “yea swayne was the man. He got me hooked on this.”

The ones who watched YouTube and Instagram ‘influencers’ nonstop all day long are usually lazy and don’t take the initiative and study hard and ‘go get it’ that learning how to fly demands. I’ve had a few of those as an instructor, and they didn’t last. They throw in the towel too soon. The students who were dedicated seemed to spend less of their time following influencers and more time digging in and getting it done.

SonicFlyer

Maybe in your mind. Yeah, some are, but don't make broad generalizations.

hindsight2020

Airline flying wasn't my motivation in life, so I'm 100% agnostic to airline pilot influencers either way. But to your general theme, agreed, the peddlers of that space tend to not like to talk about that, as it gives up their back stage machinations, which speaks to the insincerity of the brand/topic/channel being peddled in the first place. Lots of transactional grifters in that space. Lots of "analytics-chasing" shapeshifters as well. It's all a bit too late-stage capitalist for my taste tbh.

To be charitable, if you think about it, this isn't new. That pitch of "get monetized"/"side hussle turned main hustle" is not really different to me than that of the good ol' legacy MLM nutjobs, latter which has existed for many more decades. Similar arguments and appeals made as well ("break free from the grind"/"don't be a slave"/"W2 life is for suckers"). Nothing new under the sun it seems.

As you correctly point out in your closing, not much comes of it for the majority. Plenty of discord and eroded relationships though, which those who have seen the fallout of MLM nutjobbery in their personal relationships can attest to.

end of the day, millions of terabytes of low-value bandwith/data that only proves the Infinite Monkey Theorem was wrong all along.

ReadOnly7

so you guys don’t like my pilot-themed OnlyFans?

RippinClapBombs

Most influencers unless famous prior are nobody’s. They post a random video that ends up triggering the Youtube algorithm, get recommended to a broader audience and it blows up in viewership. You’ll have an average of maybe 200 views a video then you publish that one random video that triggers the algorithm and overnight you have millions of views. That leads to more views on previous and future video’s you publish(ed) and allows the algorithm to continue recommending you to a broader audience.

For Swayne it was flying his father’s Cessna from Grand Forks to Fargo to grab some Chipotle burritos for his college dorm friends. I’ve watched it. It’s a very cool video. Some background, his father works at American and let Swayne take the Cessna to Grand Forks during his college years. Yes, daddy’s money played a roll. The Chipotle airplane run was cool because it was the first Chipotle opened in North Dakota.

Personally I enjoy watching the content Swayne publishes when it randomly pops up on my Youtube feed. Unfortunately like all social media his video’s only show the “highlights” of our job. It’s all sunshine and rainbows being a mainline pilot! Heck, he made the regional job at Envoy flying the clapped out E145 look fun!

I’m on the younger side, but old enough to have witnessed multiple relationships on facebook and instagram of couples who posted every other week about there unbreakable love for each other only to find out later both were cheating. Take a guess how many posts they made about their breakup?

John Carr

That's "easy" to do when the life expentancy at the regional was what he experienced.

Imagine if he was hired years back, was at year 8-9-10 and STILL an FO, maybe downgraded at AE due to the flow backs, got to experience the downline BK effects, displaced out of MIA/BOS, etc.

I wonder how "fun" those videos would have looked?

Pilot4000

Who cares?

Tranquility

You left out those who were displaced from SJU and LAX, and how peachy some of those flow backs were to fly with, but you got the general idea.... Thanks for that trip down memory lane... 🙄

TurquoiseLine

But it didn’t so don’t hate his good deal, find your own.

This is something everyone should know:

It’s better to be lucky than good, timing is everything, there is no justice.