Negatives
- Cost £90k + type ratings
- Hard to leave once started (debt)
- Early starts (4am) late finishes (2am)
- Evenings before an early written off
- Morning after lates written off
- Little to no flexibility in shifts
- Booking leave difficult
- Be prepared to miss lots of events
- Gets worse when you have children
- Have to work weekends/holidays
- Intellectually unstimulating
- Sedentary
- Risk of tinnitus
- Elevated exposure to cosmic and UV radiation
- Eat poor quality food all day
- Industry very sensitive to recessions
- Mass redundancies every 10 years
- Heavily unionised, employee vs. Employer mentality
- No pattern, which makes weekly commitments outside of work hard
- Rarely meet other pilots in same position as you, captains gets to know FOs and FOs get to know captains.
- Anti-social, large bases mean very impersonal feel. Rare to make work friends.
- Job is highly repetitive, mundane and dull
- It kills your passion for aviation if you had one to begin with
- It makes you not want to go on holiday as it involves going to an airport when on leave.
- Reduced life expectancy
- High chance of long term sick compared to other careers
- Usually spend your first day off recovering from fatigue
- Elevated risk of kidney stones (dehydration)
- No transferable skills, virtually unemployable once out of aviation
- Most redundant pilots become delivery drivers
- Pilots mainly just monitor systems all day
- Job at high risk of becoming redundant or single pilot (technology)
- Little to no job satisfaction
- Algorithmic processes, checklists, rarely do you apply your brain. You just apply an SOP or checklist.
- Very little responsibility, captains are liable, not responsible.
- Airline industry is in a ‘race to the bottom’
- Most perks are being stripped away
- No job progression aside from Command.
- could take 10 years in this climate
- You have to hold a poo in all day at work. Reeks havoc with your bowel.
- Pilots are treated as a commodity
- Many pilots face long commutes or end up getting ‘crash pad accommodation
- No personal or professional development
- Low starting salaries in this COVID climate, will be around for years to come
- Decent chance of having to move abroad when starting out. Can be difficult to get a home base.
-
Positives
- Get to read the newspaper at work
- Can eventually earn £100k+ as a captain with no educational qualifications
- More days off
- Nice view
- Rarely have to commute in rush hour
- Leave work at work
It doesn’t take a genius to see how I feel about the job. Aviation attracts a wide range of people from those with higher educations to those who left school at 16 with none. Compared to factory work this is a reasonably good job, but compared to what I used to do, senior accountant in a large firm, it sucks.
If you want a job where you don’t do much, don’t need to go in much, get paid well for it but at the cost of your health and social life then this is the job for you. However if you are higher educated, driven, enjoy responsibility and autonomy then stay away.
The job has very little satisfaction or enjoyment.
Make sure you are Informed about what the job is really like. My flying loan is nearly paid off and I will be jumping ship as soon as possible.
Feel free to add anything I’ve missed off. Stay safe everyone.