(it's still one of the top 5 highest paying jobs in the UK ... that can't be ignored surely).
Devil is in the detail with that sort of claim - if you look at the fine print to the sort of surveys that claim that we are in the top five ( they come round in the likes of the Guardian every year) you'll often see we are in the top five of those in the workforce who are subject to PAYE.....that leaves a whole chunk of the UK workforce (e.g. all the self employed, not just high profile celebs ) out of the equation because they are renumerated at least in part by means outside PAYE.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/20...hours-earnings
To obtain the data, the ONS surveyed a random sample of 1% of all the workers who carry out each occupation, using 2015/2016 pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) tax records.
This means bonuses are included, but self-employed workers and celebrities who don’t appear on company payrolls are excluded. Information about niche occupations – for example, salaried professional footballers or TV presenters – has also been suppressed by the ONS to avoid identifying individual pay packets.
I'm not pleading poverty - It's fair to say the pay is still good at some operators, but the mean value often quoted in surveys, whilst mathematically perhaps correct, gives an incorrect impresion of general pay because it is skewed by those on the top end of the legacy payscales at some legacy airlines who maybe joined the industry two or three decades ago....what a newbie needs to ask themselves is will those top end pay points still be around in > 20 years......?