SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - Any Commercial Pilots On Here?

Oh the long and weary road of an aviation career.

my story:

I was a first semester architectural design & Drafting Student when i went to college.

Drafting and architectural design had been the only class i looked forward to through every single year of high school. Hand drawings, CAD Drawings you name it. Nothing got me more excited than to sit in front of a drafting table with my pencils and straight edges and whip out a luxurious ranch style home drawing right down to the last etching of brick in the elevation drawing.

nothing except of course, airplanes.

All my life i was a flight sim enthusiast, aviation nut job and all around model airplane builder.

One of the best Christmas gifts i ever received was from my aunt. A green hard cover book i still have within arms reach right now entitled "American Warplanes" by Bill Gunston. When i was 8 years old, all the toys and obligatory clothing was brushed aside, and hours turned into days and days into weeks of digesting the information about every single aircraft ever concievably used in military aviation. Those weeks droned into months and even years of using that publication as a reference source whenever information was needed - for any reason be it model building, or just curiosity.

By the time i was 9 years old i could identify virtually every single type of airplane ever used by the US Military up to the date.

My life was dominated by aviation books, models, movies and video games.

So, when my father approached me one perfectly clear October afternoon about going to the airport and flying an airplane - God help me - i jumped at the chance.

I never in my wildest dreams ever considered aviation as a career. But a friend of my father had sent his son to flight training and within a year or so he had been hired by an airline. Apparently, pilots were in demand to some extent.

So on October 13th, 1998 i grabbed my best pair of sunglasses and we headed out to the airport. I completed the pre-flight inspection with the guidance of a flight instructor and we climbed aboard the 1999 model Cessna 172R Registration # N2625C the airplane was factory new and labeled as a 99 model even though it was still 98 for 2 1/2 more months. The engine had so few hours on it that they were still running the manufacturer's recommended mineral oil. I flew everything from the initial takeoff climb - to short final.

It was 30 minutes of flying time that i will never forget. ever. I enrolled in the local FBO's private pilot program immediately upon return to the ground.

The next semester, leaving all of my architectural instruments in a drawer and any dreams of design drafting careers in the past - i was enrolled as an aviation major.

Things went along smoothly enough for the next few years. I started my aviation training in earnest in the fall of 1999.

At the time i was nearing graduation, any wet behind the ears student turned flight instructor with little more than 400 hours could walk into any regional airline job anywhere in the country flying CRJs and SAABs and metro-liners here and there with paying passengers aboard.

The flight school i was attending was placing something like 90+% of the applicants. and it seems like you didnt have time to make friends with other students, simply because they were out of class and into a cockpit with a part 121 airline in the blink of an eye.

The prospects were exciting because one of my last training flights toward my Commercial Pilot Certificate with Multi-Engine privileges took place on September 10th, 2001. I would rest and study on the 11th and 12th, and take a check ride with the FAA examiner on the 13th.

Fate, being the fickle bitch that she is, had other plans.

My sister called me up on 11th in a panic. I could hardly understand anything except "turn on the TV".

I sat in stunned silence with the rest of my countrymen and watched the disaster unfold. i guess it was later that day, or perhaps it was the next day the flight school called and canceled all flights until further notice.

I had absolutely no plans of being a flight instructor. I was going to do like the hundreds of other students and walk right into a job flying as an airline pilot.

I finished my training the next month and though i was proud, i knew my certificates and ratings had almost no worth in the wake of what had happened to our country, and the airline industry. I spoke to the USAF and Navy about their aviation programs - but they both frowned on my history with LASIK surgery.

I sat in my room and struggled with my options when a friend of mine who had finished training shortly before 9/11 had called me on the phone. Apparently, he was sitting in the multi-million dollar full motion flight simulator in training with his new airline gig when the instructor's station phone rang on 9/11 - the instructor finished the very brief conversation. ended the training session and politely informed my friend that the airline had no further need for his employment. - he was calling me up to ask about the two of us enrolling in a flight instructor course together to save living expenses and perhaps get a group discount.

I agreed and was enrolled in February 2002. I received my flight instructor's Certificate on my birthday March 23rd 2002. as the ink on my certificate was drying, my cell phone rang - it was an FBO owner in my home town who had heard through the grape vine that i was working on my CFI certificate. His CFI had moved to another part of the state, and he had students on the line with no instructor. I explained to him that i just finished the check ride not an hour ago. He asked me if i could be at work at 8:00 in the morning and without hesitation i told him yes.

Thus, my "career" in aviation started on 24 March, 2002. the day after my 23rd birthday. i have a star drawn in my logbook on the entry that states "First paying flight as a commercial pilot!"

I instructed for what seemed like centuries. I met a great number of interesting people while bouncing around the traffic pattern in the sweltering Texas heat day in and day out. Some of my students went on to be pilots for the US Army and US Air Force Academy Instructors, others went on to be weekend warriors, a couple quit outright. Over the course of my instructing experience i had flown about 50 different types of general aviation aircraft over most of the United States. My logbook was filling with hours every day, but a watched pot never boils as they say so it seemed like it took an eternity just to get 750 hours!

I had heard that the competitive minimums after 9/11 were insane for a low time pilot. I was gunning for 1,500 hours total time and at least 200 hours multi engine experience. eventually i got close and sent resumes to a couple of airlines, interviewed with both, and received job offers from both.

My interview was something eerie. The company has just resumed hiring. They had photographs of all the "classes" on the wall with the dates. Before the interview i took note of all the smiling faces in the photographs that lined the hall way... and how those photographs abruptly stopped in late August of 2001 and didnt resume until October of 2005.

I was hired in January 2006 and by March i was through training flying the SAAB 340s out of Dallas Ft-Worth International Airport. within 14 months i was number one on the first officer seniority list for my aircraft type. But i was quickly becoming disenchanted with it all.

Pervasive union / management politics, rotten schedules, the constant letters from upper management basically berating us for earning what little income us pilots earned and being called into the chief pilot's office to explain my actions (along with many many other pilots having to do the same) every time i made a customer service decision.

One example of what i had to explain was the following decision i made: Our SAABS were not suitable for docking up with the jet bridges at the time. So we had to let down the stairs let the passengers walk off, then up the steps leading into the jet bridge and into the terminal. This was standard operating procedure, but for security reasons there had to be an "Escort" before we could allow anyone off the plane. We parked at a jet bridge one hot summer day, the air conditioning cart was broken, the airplane was getting hot in a hurry and there was no jet bridge escort no matter how many times we called operations requesting one. finally I got out of my seat, told the flight attendant to open the door, i stood ramp side and acted as a security escort ensuring nobody wandered off into the airport wilderness. Almost every passenger walked by me with a "thank you". Management saw it differently, those escort positions are a union protected job and i was not to do that sort of thing any more. :doh:

add it onto the late arrivals at the overnights, where we were scheduled for the legal minimum rest every - single - stinking - night, and the insane number of times being extended into days off to work because of short staffing, the frequent visits by the FAA inspectors who would do cockpit ride alongs to ensure compliance with various regulations, the recurrent training every 6 - 12 months that - if failed for any reason - even if you had just come off a long trip the day before and were just exhausted during your 5:30 am Simulator evaluation - was grounds for termination and top it off with a 9 year time frame for an upgrade to a captain seat... to me, it just got to the point where dealing with all of it wasn't worth the $1,600 per month they were trickling into my bank account.

I did the math, at their pay rates... there was no way i was going to slug it out for a decade earning under $28K a year. One of the last straws was when the news paper had a story about pay raises for the city garbage men... I was flying warm bodies around the sky at 300 miles per hour and these guys were bringing in a good $10K a year more than i was picking up trash.

At the time i resigned, we were hemorrhaging 60+ First Officers per month to resignations. Almost all of the hiring was simply for the purpose of replacing the swath of resignations.

I packed up my stuff, turned in my keys, badges, and publications and went home to spend my anniversary with my wife.

The airline lifestyle wasn't for me. I viewed it as somewhat self destructive and a bit of a dead end to be honest.

Aviation is a rough lifestyle. Its a life of sleeping short overnights in motels sometimes little better than a motel six next to railroad tracks, going to bed hungry because your schedule left you little or no time to eat. Its a life style of missing birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays at home because the plane has to go regardless of whether or not it is Christmas morning. its a lifestyle of fast food and vending machine dinners. its one day after another of handling life's emergencies large and small via telephone. If sewage is backing up into the house - good luck, you have to tell your wife what to do from a hotel room telephone hundreds of even thousands of miles away. If you make a mistake on the job, you and a lot of other people might die or millions of dollars worth of equipment might be damaged and thats just the way it is.

Aviation is also a tough nut to crack in the sense that to get a decent job other than banner towing or flight instructing you have to have the experience... but how do you get the experience if almost nobody is willing to hire you without it?

its a catch 22

Aviation is also one of those industries that can cost $150-200 thousand dollars (or more) to get an education in... then once you are educated, you will be working for decades paying back those school loans. Unlike becoming a doctor or a lawyer, where the return on investment is initially pretty good... as an example, the airline was paying me $23 per hour to fly. that means i was only getting paid for the flying, nothing much else besides the $1.55 per hour per diem rate. Considering i was frequently "on duty" for 14-16 hours per day the pay actually worked out - very very frequently - to about $7-8 per hour by the end of the year.

Our mantra as young pilots was "Things are going to turn around soon."

I got tired of hearing that.

If i had it all to do over again... i would change pretty much everything.

I would have flown as a hobby, or flight instructed while my main career was something else entirely.

I wish you the best of luck in your career. Its a long hard road and you should be aware that the Boeing 747 has - for many pilots - turned out to be nothing more than a 280,000 lb carrot on a stick.