I've spent the first 8 years of flying in various airlines, from charter to major. After a serious downsizing, switched to executive more by chance than design..
Whilst most things in above posts are true in some way, they mostly miss the point about executive flying in my opinion.
Yes, sure, the free time at home is more difficult to manage generally on a private jet, but the real difference for me is the job itself!
I already had quite a serious background in Ground ops and Dispatch before coming to the private jet cockpit, but the things you learn in a month of duty around the world are many!
This month, we had a heavy maintenance check on the aircraft. Apart for some well-deserved holidays, I had to learn about
:
- Fungus contamination in fuel tanks, and the products available to fight it.
- Various methods of refurbishing and renovating an aircraft interior.
- Pros and cons of a new paint job, various ways of priming and painting an aircraft.
- Familiarize myself with JAA regulations about electronic flight bags.
- Interacting with maintenance managers, interior designers, avionics specialists
The list goes on and on, and I'm not even gonna start on the stuff you learn about local regulations for landing and overflight around the world, etc.. etc..
I just seems to me that if you like the flying business, you get to see much more of it in and around a business jet than in an airliner.
Now, on the other hand, hanging around BKK with 15 cabin ladies instead of 1, that was nice, too...
As for pay and free time, you get what you negotiate for, i guess....
As an aside: having been a regular reader in various pprune forums for quite some time now, it seems to me most people tend to post opinions about salary which are quite inflated... I've caught more than on colleague of mine expressing the view that XXX'XXXUSD was the minimal acceptable wage for some job or other, while I happen to know they themselves earn about 20 to 30% less... So, take those posts about money with a grain of salt...
Cheers,