"Give a pilot a bag of gold coins and he will probably still complain about the weight"
Sums up Pilots to a T.
I was lucky enough to be sponsored...My first airline was diabolical, pay, terms, bullies, accidents, venereal diseases whilst my course mates who had gone to the "charter boys" were creaming it in. It was only nine years after I started at flying college that my parents stopped funding my holidays and I could afford to take my family to a restaurant.(after I changed airlines for the second time). Twenty years of airline flying to a command.
Hardest part of the job was being a FO...dealing with incompetent bullies and their special mates and fortunately there were few in my last company.
In the meantime I had a lot of aviation related health problems but the job gave me a life time of memories.
Closing the throttles six miles up and spooling the engines up as land flap was running 2 miles out. Watching the sunrise from on top of a great Pyramid. Circling Mont Blanc and Mont Mckinley. Dropping out of cloud abeam the Angel falls. Watching the sunrise sipping Caiparinhas on Coppacabana with a choice of crumpet but even better was popping out of the winter smog to play chasing the clouds along the valleys of a sheet of strata CU.
The industry has always been littered with Bullies and bankruptcies - many of my former colleagues would sell their kids along with the grannies but it's no different to the many scumbags who rob us "legally" today.
I was in a flight deck of a well known Loco last autumn...The aircraft was newer and cleaner than most of those in one of my old employers, maintenance no doubt better than my early days. The skipper had more than double my average time off at base, he took home more money than he needed and was ten years younger than I was when I got a command. What he does for a pension I didn't ask but many cast iron ones like TWA and Pan Am disappeared.
My daughter had a high powered city job, loads of money (SFO pay) and for that she worked 100 hours a week, absolute wreck.
I have mates in their 60s still flying commercially...most don't need the money...they just love the life.
Me - I lost my medical nearly two decades ago...I spent ten years teaching various flying disciplines (unpaid)...I climb and fly off mountains now...can't get it out of my system - even wrote a book.
Go for it but don't think heavy metal is always the flying best job or requires the highest skills.
It also can buggar up home life.
One word of advice...you generally get what you put into it so always be up to scratch and read as much as possible - there are several recent discussions where so called professionals - the highest paid in the industry -didn't do their job properly and bent the aircraft because of lack of system knowledge or plain incompetence.
I have a poem on my wall
Everyone who lives dies.
But not every who dies has lived.
We do these things not so much that we may die
But so that we can say we have lived.