It is very difficult to find a job where one can earn anything like a SFO salary without at the very least an undergraduate degree.
Indeed it is difficult - and it's even harder to get an airline job.
Plenty of other jobs around that pay the same or more without the effort required to be a pilot
Tell that to the numerous guys who have their licence, and cant get a job....25k a year suddenly becomes a great deal of money.
I would give anything for a 25k a year job right now. In fact I was never looking to flying as a means to making big money - I'd settle for £30k a year whether I'm flying a jet or sitting behind a desk.
The problem with flying is that it is something that gets into people's blood. Yes there's the prospect of good money and the status but a lot of people just want to fly regardless of that. Otherwise why else would they still be going to flight schools and training for a career that has blatently low odds of success.
I'm not suggesting that there is no money in aviation, but to go into your training with the assumption that you will immediately get a place in the right hand seat of a shiny jet is not only speculative, it's ridiculous.
I quite agree. There are plenty of career choices out there that will have a high chance of success and decent money so why are people investing huge amounts of money and time chasing an inevitable failure? There might have been a time when it was possible to think "I want to be a pilot", do the training and land a job fairly easily. But these times are long gone for the forseeable future. The state of the airline industry is abundantly evident but people refuse to believe the reality and ignore the warnings. Something about flying makes people hell bent on pursuing it at any cost and makes them believe that they are invincible...other people may not be succeeding but
they will, because they're different.
Maybe a doctor or a lawyer doesn't earn as much as an experienced pilot but at least they can graduate in the knowledge that they will have a high chance of a career, at the end of it, with a decent income and good benefits. In fact I woud not recommend pilot training to anyone at the current time, instead I would suggest the health-care profession or engineering - both are on the UK skills shortage list and are crying out for qualified people. Make's far better sense on paper but if you have that itchy flying bug in your blood...