It must be so scary for some of the pilots I’ve met along the way, that went integrated at 18, who are now mid 30’s on £100k+. Most of which have never done a single days work outside the flight deck in their lives.
If they lose their pilot job there isn’t many jobs (if any) that pay that much without serious retraining. Only about 20% of UK taxpayers earn over £40k so it’s clear to see there won’t be high flying jobs for all the grounded pilot.
Getting passed HR is a nightmare. I’ve been doing temp office work these last couple of weeks to top up my furlough money. Even though it’s temp the company still want you to be available to them until they don’t need you not until you don’t need them anymore. So to get passed the first hurdle I told them I’d been made redundant from the airline and my base captain kindly backed it up on my reference. The interview consisted of a 5 min Skype chat and I was offered the job on the spot.
I went into the office for the first time thinking to myself keep the flying job under the radar... boom I’m sat about 3ft away from someone I went to school with, someone I have on Facebook. So now the whole office knows I’m a pilot. It’s a very surreal situation, almost like they don’t know how to talk to me as just a regular work colleague. I’ve been asked multiple times by the same person what the scariest part of flying is so either he doesn’t listen or he’s just trying too hard to make conversation.
Although I’m only hoping to be there temporarily I’ve already accepted I’ll never be “one of them” through no fault of my own. I don’t march up and down the office in my uniform nor do I start every conversation with “when I was a pilot...”. I’m actually from their social circle so I can only imagine how they would treat Lawrence or Hugh the privately educated, been in the business since puberty, pilot
Last edited by TRENT210; 4th May 2020 at 09:22.