To those who replied to my last post...
Possibly some of the original comments came across as more 'moany' than you intended, possibly my mail was more critical than I intended. Nuance is a hard thing to achieve on bulletin boards.
My point was simply that any pilots who're unhappy with their jobs almost certainly have the intelligence and wherewithal to do something else less stressful and better paid. I do at the moment but it's not going to stop me selling my house to pay for my flight training and taking at least a 75% pay cut to get that first f/o job. As to
You wannabees cannot help but see the job through rose-tinted specs, as the general public do as well. But there's a huge gap between image and reality.
That's not true in my case, reading these forums for a year and talking to as many people in the industry as I can has, I think, given me a fair idea of the realities of the job. However, some people are wannabes, some are gonnabes. When I'm 70 years old, a-sittin on my porch, I'm at least going to know that I wanted to be a paid pilot and that's what I became.
As another general point - Nostalgia aint what it used to be!