Muhammad Antar
A lot of what you write is depressingly accurate, particularly the cynical behaviour of flight training schools and airlines, the outrageous cost of training, the horribly cyclical nature of the airline industry and the knock on effects for job security. I never fully understood the volatile nature of the industry before I joined it.
I’d take issue with a few of your other points though. I enjoy my job and I go to work for more than just money, although the money is (for now) still good. I enjoy the travel, the people and the brief periods of escape from the relentless job of parenting two young children. I honestly don’t know how people who either commute 5 days a week or, god forbid, work from home don’t go completely mad. Let’s not pretend that everyone else has some deeply fulfilling job that pays them great money and has them dancing out of bed every morning. A minority do, but for most people work is work. It pays the bills.
Also, on the whole driverless car/ airplane debate I think it’s so easy to make throwaway comments about how everything will just drive itself in a few years from now. It is quite a fashionable opinion to hold. The technical challenges to implementation seem to me, to be incredibly high. Your Tesla might be OK on the wide, quiet, well marked roads of California but on the crappy congested roads of the UK I’m not so sure. Similarly we all know the pitfalls of having one person make all the decisions on the flight deck. That’s why the industry developed CRM. As long as humans are making the decisions (as opposed to moving the flight control surfaces, which I grant you the automatics are very good at doing - most of the time anyway) I don’t see how you safely move down to single Crew ops. And what you need to replace humans completely is proper AI with basically flawless resilience/redundancy. Eventually yes. In our working lifetimes, I’m sceptical.
Notwithstanding that I can’t, hand on heart, say I would recommend commercial flying to young people as a career. It is just too much of a lottery now and the ticket is far too expensive.