First point, don’t worry about all the Covid-19 stuff going on right now. By the time you finish school the market will be recovering anyway.
Few other tips or things to look at:
- try gliding. It’s cheap, still teaches you good stick and rudder skills, plus you can use the hours towards your licence requirements later on. Also keeps you interested while you save money (next point).
- save as much money as you can before commencing flight training. No matter what path you choose, the ultimate goal is to have as little (or no) debt at the end. I still owed about $60K at the end and grew to hate the repayments and the debt hanging around my neck for years. Plus being on a low salary starting out made it hard to do other things like buy a house. Check out this blog for an example of what your career pathway could look like:
https://www.goflyaviation.com.au/lat...airline-pilot/
- finish school and get some reasonable grades. Not having Year 12 could be an issue later on. But more importantly school will teach you how to study and learn. Which you’ll need later on for all the PPL/CPL/ATPL subjects (plus new aircraft, renewals, etc).
- don’t pay for any training in advance!! Ever!! Unless it’s something like a Rex cadet scheme or some other airline program, don’t pay your local flying school in advance for a whole course. I did once, they screwed me around, but because I’d already paid I couldn’t leave without losing the money.
- if it’s really what you want, just do it! There’s plenty of ‘helpful opinions’ on here which will just throw the get a job in IT line at you and call it advice. I still like my job, I still enjoy flying, 18 years after my first solo. But there’s plenty of people I fly with who don’t enjoy their job anymore, but they exist in every industry.
As the aircraft get bigger, the pay packet should grow, but so does the responsibility. The fun factor also decreases proportional to the increase in aircraft size. That’s when some guys get a private aircraft or return to gliding.