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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Pilot.

    Went to college and learned to fly at the college flight school. Going to college isn’t totally necessary but having a degree is helpful, going to a college flight school is a terrible idea, local mom and pop flight schools are faster and cheaper for equally good training. The worst mistake I made in my career was flight instructing at the college flight school after I graduated. It was in a bad weather state so I couldn’t get a lot of hours, I was supposedly paid $21/hr but the way it was structured I averaged out at around $7/hr with no benefits as a 1099.

    I got hired by a small cargo op in 2019. They’d hire me about 6 months earlier than when I would have qualified for a regional airline. It seemed like a questionable move at the time, but $50k to fly a little tiny jet seemed like a fortune. In retrospect it was a really good move when all my flight instructor friends got furloughed by the regional airlines when covid started. Normally I’d say airlines are the right move, but timing is everything.

    After 3 years flying cargo I was tired of having my circadian rhythm get obliterated every week and I got hired to fly for a big bizjet company. Fun job, went to lots of cool airports and flew some interesting people, new hire pay was great, top end pay was terrible and the benefits were awful.

    I got hired by one of the big US airlines in the hiring rush from 2022-23. Pay is amazing, benefits are really good, the work is somewhat boring but easy, and I have a strong union. 10/10 big airlines are great, I’m not leaving unless the company goes under, which is always a possibility. Now the only problem is that Boeing can’t seem to get their shit figured out so the industry has stopped hiring again because there aren’t enough new planes even though demand is fine.

    TLDR: timing is everything.



  • As a professional pilot. I don’t think there’s any future in single pilot ops. Realistically the only time you need two pilots in a modern airliner is when shit’s fucked sideways, which is exactly the time the single pilot in this situation needs to work. Normal ops are easy. You could automate that no problem, what is hard is automating whatever combination of failures and weather the engineers never thought of.

    Maybe in cargo, where the stakes are lower, it’ll happen. But in passenger ops, I think we’ll go from 2 pilots to no pilots before we go to one pilot.