I almost never post on pprune but threads like this are important to people thinking about entering the industry so I'm going to throw my 2p worth in.
I fly a heavy jet around Europe working very hard in the summer and not so hard in the winter. I love my job and couldn't imagine doing anything else. However having said that if I had my time over again knowing what I know now I wouldn't enter the industry. This is a feeling echoed by many of my colleagues.
The reasons I would not enter the industry again are as follows:
As a new trainee entering the industry will realistically have to pay around £100000. This is a life changing amount of money. If you are not lucky enough to have that kind of money lying around either you or your family will have to get a loan, re- mortgage your home or work and save for a very long time to save £100000 of disposable income.
If you need a loan there is only 1 company in the UK that will fund flight training. They have very strict criteria that have to be met in order to be offered the loan. The criteria are more difficult to satisfy than getting a mortgage for buying a house and is for a maximum term of 10 years which is substantially shorter than most mortgages. The repayments for this loan in the most optimistic scenario with interest remaining at their historically low level is about £900 a month. This has to be paid every month or the home which you have secured it on will be repossessed. This is a real scenario and has happened to people. £900 is a lot of money to find each month on most entry level salaries in the aviation industry. If you are not lucky enough to get a job straight out of training add on to this the cost of keeping your licence current in order to remain attractive to potential employers.
The percentage chance for a newly qualified frozen ATPL getting a job that pays you to fly for an airline on a proper employment contract is very very slim. Particularly in the UK where highly experienced many thousand hour jet captains are struggling to find gainful employment. It's a huge gamble to take with such a large amount of money that if it doesn't pay off will hamper the rest of your life. If your credit rating shows such a large debt you will struggle to achieve any more debt so things like mortgages, credit cards and even mobile phone contracts become more challenging and all you have to show for your troubles is a cheap blue plastic wallet.
For those who will immediately say that's only the UK and European markets this is true but in order to apply to other parts of the world eg Middle East / Far East a very quick check of the current requirements for these jobs shows a requirement for at least 3000 of hours experience on jet aircraft and most above the weight categories above those the pay to fly schemes will satisfy. If you can afford to buy into these schemes and remain on them long enough to build the hours required to move on then you are lucky but you will be among the very lucky few.
To everyone who will say follow your dream and paint the romantic picture of bursting through the clouds a sun rise and tell you there's nothing like it, it's true. However the excitement and sparkle of this soon goes when your on day six of your run of early starts with min rest in between and all you want to do is finish so you can get your 2 days off to recover get your life organised maybe see you friends and family before you start again with the only difference being that your now on lates and will get home at 4 am instead of getting up at 4am.
Ultimately the excitement of flying a big aircraft doesn't really exist for very long it becomes just a job very quickly, a fun job where you mostly work with nice people, but really it's just a way to earn money to fund your lifestyle. It is very regimented and repetitive job you see crew room, flight deck, runway, sky, runway, 10min outside doing the walk round, say hello to cabin crew then flight deck, runway, sky, runway, crew room and repeat. If you make a mistake there are questions to be answered ranging from file an ASR and forget about it to sorry you've lost your job depending on severity of the mistake.
There is also the issue of it can be a very unstable industry with redundancy a real possibility. I thankfully have never experienced this so cannot talk about it intelligently but I have worked with many people who have lived through this scenario and it is a tough one to survive financially.
This has been a very long post so thank you for reading it is only my view so I'm sure there will be many who do not agree.
My final comment would be that to succeed in this industry has very little to do with ability, willingness to work, determination or cash it is mostly luck in qualifying at the right time and being in the right place when a job becomes up.