Originally Posted by
alexeyAP
happyjack, apologies if I caused offense but the 'horror' of those situations is that one can be in limbo for years after completing training, and many people give up and settle for something lesser, even if it is still flying. I hope you'll excuse my cheek before but my end goal (as was yours at one point it seems) is to go and fly for the airlines one day. Safe travels.
Flying a Bizjet or Cargo or a Twin Otter around the Orkneys is often, believe it or not, a choice rather than a “lesser” job. Professional aviation is a very mixed career - a colleague of mine gave up a jet command at a good airline to go fly a turboprop in a very challenging environment, his comment being that he was absolutely fed up to the back teeth of sticking the autopilot in at 1000 feet, flying to Tenerife and clicking it out. Might not seem like it to you, but it’s a job, and at times a very brutal one. Covid shows you how crew can be treated when times are tough…
I fly for a major airline, one of my friends flies a Gulfstream for a private owner. He has far more time off down route than I do, far nicer destinations and the jet’s owner has on occasion paid for a ticket for his wife to join him in sunny climes. I wouldn’t want to do his job, there’s too much standby and he has to do a lot more work on the planning side than I would, it’s a lot more independent and less “shut the flight deck door and go home” than I like. Equally he would feel completely stifled in the environment I operate in, and wouldn’t get on at all with a very uniform corporate culture that I like very much as it provides me with a good work/life balance.
The best job is the one you want - and we all want different things. Flying is flying, there is nothing special about flying for an airline; many would argue quite the opposite in fact!
Edit: the reason people are being prickly is that, without any professional aviation experience, you are calling certain jobs “lesser”. That, for me at least, includes colleagues who have fought hard for an airline job, been made redundant or even decided that it is not for them, and taken to flying air ambulance flights or bizjets, are “lesser” pilots and to be looked down upon from the lofty heights of a 737-800 on its way to Faro, arguably the most vanilla job of all. The man whose job I, personally, envy most has never flown anything bigger than an Aztec (and believe it or not that’s all he ever wanted to do).