Originally Posted by
excrab
Personally I feel sorry for anyone starting in the RHS of a 737 or Airbus at any airline in their twenties. You might end up at 65 with good seniority and pension but doing European short haul your whole life would be desperately boring.
Find that way too negative and judgemental. I started on an 150 seat narrowbody in my twenties, upgraded to CPT and trainer relatively quickly (both after less than 10 years) and I still tremendously enjoy flying around Europe. So far I have flown to all the major airports in Europe (MAD, FRA, MUC, LHR, ZRH, AMS, CDG, FCO), I have flown to all the typical charter destinations (canaries, the greek islands, PMI, IBZ, corsica, sardinia, ...), all that mixed with lots of smaller european cities (ALC, FAO, NCE, BUD, WAW, these are just examples, there are a three digit figure of them), and besides all that I flew as far as the canaries, north africa, egypt, israel, russia, iceland etc.
It was pretty much everything within 5h of flight time of central europe and with 1700m of concrete. It is a tremendous variety in flying challenges and it all comes with hardly any night flights, no jetlag and no flat-sitting of your backside for hours over an ocean.
I might want at one point to go longhaul, but if not, no regrets either.
If I go longhaul, I'd prefer a medium size widebody which has a more divers route network. The thought of going to the same 8 destinations for 20 years sounds scarily boring to me. But each to their own.