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Old 6th Aug 2020, 20:59
  #237 (permalink)  
guy_incognito
 
Join Date: Apr 2020
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I'm not (immediately) at risk of losing my job, as a reasonably well established captain in what should be a safe base in a safe airline (all of that is of course very much subject to change).

However, I have today made the decision to actively look for another career at the earliest possible opportunity. There are a number of reasons for it. Put simply, I don't like flying and I despise the industry in general. I can't see any realistic chance of anything improving. I don't see there being any significant recruitment for pilots for the next decade or more. The fabled "pilot shortage" has never existed, but now the exact opposite of that myth is true. Pilots will be falling over themselves to feast on any meagre scraps the industry throws at them. I said earlier in the thread that captain salaries would fall to the level of train drivers, but without any of the associated benefits of working for a train company. I now think that assessment may prove somewhat optimistic.

I still have a reasonable amount of time to go before I can retire. If it were just me, or even just me and my other half, then I could possibly try to stick it out. However, I can't in good conscience take the serious risk that I'll end up unemployed just at the time when I'll be paying secondary school or university fees for my kids. I genuinely don't see how anybody embarking on a pilot career could ever take the risk of taking on a mortgage, spending money on a car, going on holiday etc. I don't see how anybody embarking on a pilot career could start a family, knowing that there's a very good chance they'll be in a position in the future where their family will end up on the street when they lose their job.

There is no other career that I can think of off hand which is so limiting in terms of transferrable skills; that requires you to be prepared to drop everything and potentially move to the other side of the world just to "stay current"; that has an all pervading narrative from management that you should think yourself bloody lucky to have a job. Anybody who has the means (financial and otherwise) to find another career would be absolutely mad not to pursue another path.
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