job related rant

[gimpy117]

Thats why im getting MY A&P. Its too expensive to fly anymore. especially at western. My advisor TOLD me that if i didn't have a lot of money don't fly here.
it's $150,000 at Western Michigan University to get a your commercial. and then you make $16,000 starting. The dream is over. Cheap airfare has killed the pilots salary.

[nikimcbee]

almost NO job prospects

This is where I'm REALLY pissed at my alma matter, for mass-producing teachers in a field, where there is practically no jobs! (foreign lang, specifically Russian)

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by gimpy117

Thats why im getting MY A&P. Its too expensive to fly anymore. especially at western. My advisor TOLD me that if i didn't have a lot of money don't fly here.
it's $150,000 at Western Michigan University to get a your commercial. and then you make $16,000 starting. The dream is over. Cheap airfare has killed the pilots salary.

good luck.

you should enjoy a fair amount of job security as the government mandates job security for A&P mechanics through the regulations.

every airplane is required to have specific maintenance done no matter how much or how little flying it does, as you are aware... theoretically, an airplane could sit in a hangar 90% of the year but would at least be required to have and annual inspection

however, nobody is required by regulations to be a passenger... thus the job of pilot is not "mandated".

[nikimcbee]

How saturated is the job market with pilots? It sounds like the same situation, but with social studies teachers. They are a dime a dozen.

...or you go work in a less desirable market. Be a bush pilot in Alaska.

[Bakkels]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

I understand why he did it.

you cannot expect a man to go to work for $18,000 a year in this country doing a job that cost him well over $100,000 in school loans to get into, flying hundreds of thousands of passengers a year all over the United States, on that wage... 240+ days a year away from home barely able to afford to feed himself let alone any family he may or may not have.

Wait, I think I must be misinterpreting this. Are you talking about a commercial airline pilot job? Does that make 18k in the US nowadays? That's a ridiculously low wage.
Aside from that, I feel your frustration. It's a damn shame to see talent go to waste, especially if he's practically forced by economic circumstances.

[Bubblehead Nuke]

Even worse are people who show up for work and want to start at 75-80K a year and never do any of the 'gunt work' that any job field requires. Not a day of actual experience and they expect to max out the earning potential.

I do not know how many times I have told some young kid: "It does not matter that you graduated from 'such and such' school with high honors." You are gonna start here on the bottom of the heap and work up.

I seem to have a high turnover rate because I do not give in and give them the pay they feel they deserve. They think the grass is greener elsewhere and I *WISH* I could be there when reality smacks them in the forehead. Over half come back within 6 months and ask if they could work for my company (and me) again.

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by nikimcbee

...or you go work in a less desirable market. Be a bush pilot in Alaska.

Or fly MiGs for Qaddafi...

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by Bakkels

Wait, I think I must be misinterpreting this. Are you talking about a commercial airline pilot job? Does that make 18k in the US nowadays? That's a ridiculously low wage.
Aside from that, I feel your frustration. It's a damn shame to see talent go to waste, especially if he's practically forced by economic circumstances.

No he didnt have a commercial airline pilot job... he did not have the required flight time to get many jobs like that, and there are just not many places that take a low time pilot hiring at the moment... he was just doing odd flying jobs when they came available, which is not something that comes up frequently.

as for the airline pilot pay i talked about:

take a look at Mesa airlines, they are probably the lowest paying regional carrier in the United States. (remember... just because the airplane says United Express or US Airways express on the side doesnt mean the airplane has anything to do with those companies other than a code share agreement behind the scenes)

year one new hire first officer makes $19.00 per flight hour with a guarantee of 76 hours of flying per month. The pilot may fly more or less than the guarantee.

so, before taxes that translates to $1,444 per month - or - $17,328 per year. Remember this is before taxes and other costs like insurance benefits etc.

but, if you hang in there... within 5 years you will reach the salary cap of the first officer position at an annual income of $23,712 - again before taxes etc.

one of the higher paying regional airlines is American Eagle.

new hire annual salary just over $21,000

salary cap for the first officer position there comes at 8 years at $32,659

it takes between 5-7 years to get a captain seat depending on the carrier, and once a captain seat is secured, the pay rate usually increases by about 45%

The airline industry is set up for "movement" meaning that regional airlines hire pilots who will be First officers. as senior captains leave the airline to go to places like FedEx, American, Delta etc this creates a vacancy and everyone moves up in seniority. eventually the new hire pilot has moved up in seniority enough to become a captain.

for the past 10 years there has been little to no movement. American Airlines for example - has not hired a "new" pilot in about 10 years.

at the moment, there are pilots at the regional level who have been with those companies for so long that they are making a decent living... and it is simply not worth it to many of them to resign to take a new job at another company because they will take a massive paycut for the first 3 or 4 years of employment at the new company.

the result is "stagnation" - everyone is inching their way up the seniority list, and hiring and shedding of pilots is only about 10-20 per month. ideally regional carriers should be shedding and hiring about 60 to 80 pilots per month if not more.

EDIT:

he is qualified as an instructor because the school's degree program required the flight instructor certificate - not because he wanted to be a CFI. I told him to bite the bullet and flight instruct... he does not want to do this because he feels that he would not be a good instructor because he has no instructing experience.

my logic is that every flight instructor, at some point had "zero" experience as a flight instructor. at some point you need to do like i did so many years ago when faced with a course load of new students... 1) give yourself a pep talk in the mirror 2) when that doesnt work, vomit. 3) wipe the vomit off your chin and go out there and just try to enjoy the fact that someone is paying you to fly something.

after a couple of months, it wouldnt bother him any more.


on the plus side, he may yet do that. but he needs something to pay the school loans off with and humpin it around the pattern in 100 degree texas heat isnt going to bring him that many sweat sogged dollars.

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by Bubblehead Nuke

Even worse are people who show up for work and want to start at 75-80K a year and never do any of the 'gunt work' that any job field requires. Not a day of actual experience and they expect to max out the earning potential.

I do not know how many times I have told some young kid: "It does not matter that you graduated from 'such and such' school with high honors." You are gonna start here on the bottom of the heap and work up.

I might as well hop on the Rant-o-Van.

We had a discussion about this on one of our intranet forums. Young people are hired into my industry (Geopolitical Analysis) but leaving after 2 years because they are bored or are not being used to "their" capability.

I have 27 years experience, a Master's Degree (ABD on my Doctorate) and I am only slightly above average in experience/education. I know that I, and many of my co-workers sound like curmudgeons (and we are), when we talk about it taking years to even start getting a reputation in my industry.

When I started out in the 1980's grunt, crappy research projects were all there was. It took me about 5 years before getting my first nice project and I was lucky to get that. It was actually a research project no one else wanted, but, through hard work by my team, turned out to be pretty cool.

Yeah, I am a crotchity old man, but the facts are clear. In my industry, it takes years to start establishing a reputation that gets you the good assignments. The kids are graduating with their Bachelor's degree and zero experience and expecting not only the six figure salary but also the pick of the projects.

WTF? Everyone else had to work up from the grunt work. Did we like getting crappy assignments? Of course not. We hated it. But we looked at it from an "investment" point of view. If I do well on the crap assignments, soon I will "graduate" to the better assignments, and later even better assignments.

It seems like the younger generation wants, and I hate to use an over used term, instant gratification. They want the cool projects right away and they expect the better assignments even though they don't have the experience and judgment to handle them.

So what is happening is that our industry is losing potentially good analysts who are unwilling to accept the concept of working up from the bottom and the value of experience. This is not good for my industry as us curmudgeons are getting a bit long in the tooth and we are starting to die off.

One of the problems is that PA has lousy PR.

Political Analysis is a job that everyone thinks they can do and yes, as we tell people, anyone can be a political analyst, the question is can they be a good political analyst? What is the difference between a Political Analyst and a good Political Analyst?

About 20 years and a doctorate.

The bottom line of my rant is that there are jobs out there that require experience. No college can grant 20+ years experience. The only way to get experience is to start at day one and earn the experience. There are no short cuts, there are no fast-tracks to experience.

Sometimes I think the younger generation in my industry either don't understand this, or don't want to accept it.

Hey, if there is one thing a curmudgeon can do is rant right?

[August]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

flight instruction positions to a fair number of recent graduates

I've heard of this practice in the big corporate schools. Nothing wrong with hiring a graduate but he'd need at least 15-20 years field experience to go with it before he would be considered for a teaching gig at our school.

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by Platapus

The bottom line of my rant is that there are jobs out there that require experience. No college can grant 20+ years experience. The only way to get experience is to start at day one and earn the experience. There are no short cuts, there are no fast-tracks to experience.

I couldnt agree more.

In the aviation industry - in theory - you have flown as a flight instructor, or you have worked for a crappy small talk cargo carrier hauling checks through bad weather in the dead of night, or you have flown business owners around in small corporate aircraft or any number of things before you get to even the regional airline level.

by the time you get to the airline level, hauling live bodies around the nation, my opinion is that a person deserves more than 17-20K a year.

not that this young man was complaining about the low pay etc... his complaint is that there is nothing for him out there in the world in his chosen trade.

I know what he means, i have been standing there at the airport looking at the airplanes with a whopping 300 hours in my logbook wondering how in the hell i was going to manage to get a job.

the catch 22 is every job is looking for a pilot with 4 times the flight time he has... and his question is "how do i get the flight time if every job out there requires you to already have it?"

the answer has universally been, banner towing, glider towing, or flight instruction. those are the three jobs any newly minted commercial pilot can go out and do with absolutely no experience, with rock bottom flight time.

i have repeatedly suggested instructing as it is the easiest of the three jobs to snatch up - but he lacks confidence in his ability to teach others.

oh well

i wish him all the success in the world, he is a hard worker.

i guess on some level i can sympathize with the young folks.

i always took the attitude that "they have to earn it just like we did" but i have come to discover that for many of them... the cost of living is just so damned high that they need the higher salary as an adjustment to the higher cost of living.

i remember some friends of mine who got based in LAX... they said their whole class of new hires all 8 of them lived in the same 2 bedroom apartment because thats the only way they could afford to live in LA. some of them even put sleeping bags in the floor of the closets (nobody used closets for storing clothes due to living out of suitcases) and that was their home.

maybe i just have higher standards for the way people who have invested their life and driven themselves into debt just to find work deserve to live.

[Platapus]

So much for the myth of the "glamorous" life of an Airline Pilot.

<20K does stynk.

Do Pilots get any type of per diem when they have to stay outside their home?

[GoldenRivet]

my per diem was $1.55 per hour

IIRC that was for up to 14 hours per day.

anyhow, it really amounted to enough to buy food while on duty.

[Platapus]

That does stynk

[Castout]

Aww sounds bad.

Same reason why anyone would want to become a US president

The pay is so small, the working hour is like forever and more, the stress is over the roof, the prestige and friends are short lived while the enemies are eternal.

The salvation comes from the seminars and selling books that come afterward

Well but military chiefs get a much better positions in the defense industry . . . .