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Semi Retired Aviator -> RE: becoming a pilot (10/8/2007 3:08:24 AM)
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feihu, and the other angle onthat is if you wqnt to stay married, don't take up flying. There aren't many of us who aren't on ouor second or third marriage. It's those damned flight attendants on layovers that cause the problem.
As for flying as a career, there aren't many better, if you don't mind sweating through a couple of medicals, one check in the airplane, four checks in the simulator a year, and another three or four days in the class room with an exam at the end, every year for the rest of your career.
The pay has been great, but many airlines are whittling that down because they believe there will be no shortage of people wantintg to fly and they're doing that by setting up low cost carriers at lower salaries. If you don't mind being disliked by most of the other staff because of your salary and lifestyle (except flight attendants who try to cadge drinks for favours), and even they'd dislike us if they weren't all trying to marry a pilot, then it's not a bad place to be!
Having said all that, when you open the taps on a big jet, and 30 seconds later lift off and pull up the gear and start accelerating to 900 km/hr, and then putting a couple of hundreds of tons back on the runway smoothly at the other end, then that is a great feeling. But along with that goes the responsibility of keeping it safe, flying in all sorts of weather whether you want to or not, back of the clock flying which is damned tiring, and a whole host of other things that most profesions never encounter.
And then there's not much more satisfying for most workers than popping out of the rain/snow and gloom at the minima, which might be zero feet (as the wheels hit the ground), and only a couple of hundred metres of forward visibility, seeing that strip of bitumen right in front of you and greasing it on. You walk back to the crewroom feeling like a million bucks.
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