Would I do it again? Yes, with no shadow of a doubt. But for me the path to the left seat of a jet started with four thousand hours of instructing on a PPL, to single crew air taxi to tail wheel bush planes to right and left seat business jets then airline turbo props to the left seat of a Boeing. I’ve seen the sunrise in my eyes over the North Atlantic and I’ve seen it set over the Indian Ocean. I’ve waterskied with a tail dragger on unnamed rivers in New Guinea, and seen the Northern Lights, and I’ve looked down on rain forests and deserts, and I’ve done walk arounds in minus thirty centigrade and in plus fifty. None of those things could I have imagined when I was living in my parents council house and washing glasses in the local pub. Yes I’d do it again.
But as someone said earlier on in the thread, the past is another country. If I had £100k now and there was no pandemic would I spend that money on an Airbus rating to spend maybe five or six years in the right seat of an airbus then maybe thirty five years in the left, flying from Gatwick to Malaga and doing two sim checks a year and worrying about an annual medical and working anti social hours and weekends and wondering how long it would be before they invent a pilotless airbus and didn’t need me anymore. No I don’t think I would. I’d find a reasonably well paid job doing something else, I’d get a modular CPL and an instructor rating and a share in a Chipmunk, put the rest of the money down as a deposit on a house, and spend a day each weekend teaching aerobatics from a grass strip where there was a decent cafe and a bar...
However, it doesn’t really matter what I would do, or what anyone else would do. If you want to fly for a living you’ll find a way, eventually. But don’t expect that way to be either cheap or easy. It never was, and it never will be...