Originally Posted by
Sam Ting Wong
Nobody in here excelled at school, You wouldn't be in this line of work if you had :-))
Actually, I did quite well at an excellent university and could have taken a number of jobs in finance (investment banking, consulting, venture capital) that probably would have brought me back to uni for an MBA and/or JD. I chose to serve my country in the military out of a sense of duty and a passion for aviation. I left the military after enough deployments to the desert and started an airline career (mistake).
Perhaps our backgrounds (upbringing and schooling) is why I see things so differently from “your” generation. Cheap cadets pilots with little self respect or sense of worth have taken a once proud career and denigrated it, as was intended by cynical employers that prefer robots over a “Sully” and then brag about their safety focus.
In economics, we call this late stage capitalism when too many goods and services are relegated to commodities (widgets), and input costs are excessively reduced such that the quality of the products are compromised. Hiring low to no time pilots, spinning them through a mini flying school, having them sit on their thumbs for 3-4+ years as SOs, and calling it good is a massive compromise from my vantage point.
That much of the industry does this now is no consolation to me. Flying with CX’s two bar cadet JFOs is usually a lot of work. I miss the ejection seat, both figuratively and literally. Then, we get to be disparaged by the same pilots we just babysat for hours while they put downward pressure on our contracts. Yeah, it’s a bitter pill to swallow.