No one is belittling you stu,
BUT I try and give people the actual on the coal face reality.As I have said before if you love flying work in the city and fly some sporty aerobatic plane at the weekend.......do not think of airline flying.
We are extremely limited in the hand flying we do, I may do 3-4 mins worth in a 7 hour flight.It is mostly not about stick and rudder these days.
I think the comparison with a truck driver is spurious.Yes every job has responsibility, however if a truck driver screws up he may kill a few other motorists and write off his wagon (what are these worth £100k ?). If I screw up we are talking a £40m aircraft and 200 passengers, not to mention the negative press which has doomed several airlines after that sort of incident.
Also the business decisions I make on a daily basis have big repercussions - if I fill the aircraft up that's about £40000 of fuel.
Pilots tend to compare their lot with supposedly similar professions, hence the disenchantment when compared with the terms and conditions of some of those. Of course there will always be more lowly,badly paid jobs but I don't sit there thinking, 'actually we are doing quite well compared with the geezer who puts ads for the kebab house through my letterbox'.An unfair and pointless comparison.