What is this job to you?

What is this job to you?

  • Just a business decision. I’m in it for the money.

    Votes: 9 10.6%

  • I’ve loved airplanes since I was a kid, what else would I do?!

    Votes: 65 76.5%

  • I like my job, but I don’t geek out about airplanes or airline history.

    Votes: 25 29.4%
  • Total voters
    85
ZapBrannigan

ZapBrannigan

If it ain’t a Boeing, I’m not going. No choice.
I flew with a couple of pilots in the last month or so, and during the course of conversation I would point out a unique or rarely seen airplane come to find out they couldn’t identify it. Nothing crazy, a Dornier Jet, a Metroliner, a Vision Jet…
Later on, we get to talking about general aviation and they admit they don’t like it, have no interest in ever pursuing it as a hobby, and to them it was just a means to an end.
Both used the same words to describe how they ended up as airline pilots - “This was just a business decision for me. I don’t have a passion for aviation.”

This floored me. I’ve been doing this for a living for almost 30 years. From crappy jobs, to PFT, to furloughs, bankruptcies, mergers, check
rides, medicals, crappy hotels, food stamps, being gone for holidays and birthdays, flying odd hours, eating Thanksgiving dinner from vending machines or gas station convenience stores… and even living in my car for a while. But I never stopped loving airplanes.

Sure it’s a crappy job and a horrible profession sometimes, but it’s that passion for aviation that keeps me going. I don’t see how anyone can put up with all the awful stuff if you don’t love it. If you don’t get excited to see a 727 in the wild. Or wistful when you see your very first commuter turboprop taxi out in front of you in some field in Mexico. Or geek out about Derg’s space age widebody, or the latest high tech biz jet. I don’t get it.

It took me 20 years to get to the job I have now, so maybe I can’t wrap my head around the one job wonders who made it here 5 years after starting to learn to fly. Maybe when things go that quickly with no speed bumps the allure of big money and (what they perceive to be) small sacrifice makes it worth the gamble. But these people haven’t read hard landings, can’t identify a DC9 two out of three attempts, and couldn’t care less about that cool Tupolev we saw rusting in the sun in Havana. Make it make sense to me.
 
I ran into the same thing in the Marine Corps. We would be at an FBO for a gas and go, and I'd point something out on the ramp and try to have a conversation about GA. I'd often get a "meh, that's not really my thing" or something like that. To each their own. I'm not going to judge, but I don't really get it.
 
Personally, I care far less about "love" and far more about respect for the profession. I'm more concerned with the next generation respecting that our craft is one with a century of tradition, one with privileges and responsibilities like few others, one that requires the utmost in public trust, and that it's our duty to maintain those traditions and public trust.

Our craft is half science, half art. The best pilots view themselves as both artisans and student.
 
This job is an utmost means to an end. I absolutely do it professionally but could not care less about general aviation, love or anything else. I don't even want to look at an airplane unless I'm getting paid.

My friend who is a successful lawyer got her private last year invited me to go along in the Cessna. What a TERRIFYING experience, non towered airports, some single crappy piston engine, honestly even getting into a Pilatus or King Air feels like a chinsy tin can after flying airliners around for 20 years. I will never get in another general aviation plane again.

Every week I come into work there's two more useless apps that are "required for flight", great. Some TSA agent on a power trip yelling at people over an oversized toe nail clipper. Another app to save gas meanwhile they don't care enough to clean the operation up enough to get us on the gate in any meaningful amount of time. A two mile long line to get a coffee or sandwich. Apparently next year the airplane is going to audibly tell me when I'm entering a runway, awesome, because I had no idea where I was before.

Why do I continue doing this job?

Approaching 40 I go out to dinner with other friends and all of their jobs sound miserable. Endless zoom calls, they answer emails all night and all weekend. long. They work 70 hour weeks in the hospital, have moronic bosses, people in sales spend more nights a year in hotels than we do. It all sounds miserable for the salary they get vs time invested. So plod away at the airline and Air Force I will until Airbus engineers us out of the cockpit.

Everyone says I'd miss it, but over the pandemic I went a year without flying a plane or seeing the inside of a hotel room. Never been happier. Sorry to be a downer but there's nothing great about this other than the time off and 17% 401k match that hopefully gets me outta here by age 55.
 
I’ve loved airplanes since I was a kid and one way or another I’ve been lucky to make a living with them for something like 17 years. I love all of it. Single pilot IFR in a Navajo in southeast alaska, crap weather at 2 AM flying medevac, chasing down a tough troubleshooting problem on an engine, tearing out an entire instrument panel and putting in clean, well labeled new wiring, switches, and circuit breakers, tearing a landing gear down to its component parts and seeing it work smoothly again after putting in all shiny new parts, cranking and banking to make tourists think a Cherokee 6 is an F-16, operating an airplane packed with 180 people into places like ORD and JFK, staying in downtown hotels with an easy walk to awesome food and the best museums in the country, taking a hotel bike to a frisbee golf course I’ve never played before, etc.

I will say, as @Soku39 points out the airline life does do its best to grind all of that out of you. At the medevac gig, by the time 2 weeks off was coming to an end I was always excited to go back to work early on the first day, rock out to some tunes in my headphones while doing a preflight, make myself a latte in the base espresso machine, and go say hi to my friends in the daily briefing. I’m commuting back to work today after 16 days off and idgaf about it, I’d just as soon stay home. As above my risk tolerance for things like single engine pistons has gotten a lot lower over the years. Also, the modern airline training programs (at least at Eskimo) do a good job of squashing the curiosity that had me drawing electrical and fuel system schematics for a Duchess or a 172.
 
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The passion is what offsets what sucks about the career. Without that I think many will hate going to work. I guess that's typical business. I've been out three years with a great retirement. I don't miss the job, the travel (except maybe Hawaii layovers), or UPS, but I do miss flying big jets. Looks like I'm gonna pay to get current in a 757 sim in Feb in Miami....FOR FUN. I do fly small planes some and keep my CFI current. I also have a AATD sim in a home office that I've been playing around with and hope to do some teaching in and really enjoy that. And ZAP, I think you've had about as challenging career as anyone. Can you imagine some of your business decision F/O's facing that? They would be out in a heartbeat.
 
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DE727UPS said:
The passion is what offsets what sucks about the career. Without that I think many will hate going to work. I guess that's typical business. I've been out three years with a great retirement. I don't miss the job, the travel (except maybe Hawaii layovers), or UPS, but I do miss flying big jets. Looks like I'm gonna pay to get current in a 757 sim in Feb in Miami....FOR FUN. I do fly small planes some and keep my CFI current. I also have a AATD sim in a home office that I've been playing around with and hope to do some teaching in and really enjoy that. And ZAP, I think you've had about as challenging career as anyone. Can you imagine some of your business decision F/O's facing that? They would be out in a heartbeat.
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I’d echo this! If I didn’t have a passion for flying and aviation this job would be miserable. There’s times I struggle with going to work and I do have a passion for it. That always makes me wonder about the people who got pushed into flying.
 
I don’t have a passion for it, but I do enjoy it. I can’t identify anything that I haven’t flown myself and decline every invitation to aviation museums. I picked this as a career because I wanted to do something that was not a normal occupation in my community. I stuck with it because I’m goal oriented and wasn’t sure what to do if I quit. I had a brief stint around Covid where I tried other things but ultimately it was less enjoyable than flying with even less time off.
 
Has anyone ever read the Dark Tower series of books? In it there are these people called the Breakers. The Breakers were telepaths and even though they didn’t know why when they were doing the job of “breaking” all was right with the world. They would get in this groove and everything else would just melt away and the only thing that mattered was “breaking.” Almost like an addiction. An addiction to the action of breaking.

That’s me. Insert flying for breaking. When I’m flying all is right with the world. I get in a groove. Things make sense. The world is easy to comprehend. Flying is all that matters. Then I land and chaos ensues. And then I long for the next time I get to do the job of flying again.
 
I enjoy this job because I enjoy flying. If you don't enjoy flying in general then you are going to be miserable.

Personally I haven't cared much about GA since I left it behind. I do keep my CFI stuff current but I haven't used it in over a decade.

I do pay attention to other aircraft out there and look them up if I don't know what they are. I don't read flying or AOPA magazine anymore since I don't find their stuff to be especially relevant to what I am doing.

Basically I am mixed bag. I enjoy aviation a ton. My focus is more airline specific these days. I do find myself thinking back to the fun of flying GA but I also think about the costs involved along with the reduction in safety. It is hard to justify when I already fly at a job I enjoy. Also, women still don't care that I am a pilot and I don't think owning a plane would change that 😅
 
I personally find 121 flying to be boring as chit and not the least bit challenging, and something I could only do part time like I do, and definitely not full time. Of course, that’s the way 121 flying is supposed to be, it’s not supposed to be exciting, as exciting scares pax. And that’s not good for business. The thing I find about those who have only done this kind of flying or have fast tracked to it, is they really don’t know what they don’t know when it comes to other things that may be cool in aviation. Their road to their career job has been a laser-focused target, with no time or effort given to considering anything else, that there is no appreciation or passion ever developed for aviation in a macro sense. Thus, it really does become “just a job”, to people like this.

Like any other job, to them. Sad part is, they have never really enjoyed aviation. Never experienced flying just to fly, to go up in an airplane or helicopter with nowhere they really have to be, with no timeframe they have to adhere to, to be able to go wherever they want to go. They’ve never been released from prison, so to speak, so to walk outside in the real world without the structure that “prison” provides, such as checklists, dispatchers, a crew, etc, a number that I’ve seen feel lost and uncomfortable. It’s not the very narrow comfort zone that has been developed for them from their inception in aviation, and they tend to not want to venture there.

Hell, I just did a checkride for a guy who was having all kinds of trouble merely flying single pilot. He was so crew reliant, as that has been his entire background of flying, that he was having trouble managing the aircraft, while having to brief an approach plate and set up an instrument approach, on a deliberate 9 minute enroute leg of his IFR clearance I had issued him. Something that should take all of 2-3 minutes. This guy is a very nice guy and a competent crew pilot, but just couldn’t fathom flying an aircraft without someone else in the cockpit doing “their part” towards the completion of the flight. Interesting and a little sad to see, both at the same time. One doesn’t have the opportunity to appreciate the things they don’t know.

The general direction that things seem to be going, from my own 35 years in aviation.
 
Maurus said:
Honestly though there are some people that enjoy the job too much. I know a guy that is not only an airline pilot and still flies GA but will also load up MS Flight Sim and continue doing fake airline flights at home on his days off. That is too much for someone like me.
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Never really understand the people who like to do games of the exact thing they do in real life. Flying tactical jets with a few combat tours in the past, I have never had the desire, nor have undertaken, playing DCS, for example. It’s been of zero interest to do so. Granted, I don’t do any online gaming, so that may be part of it. But even with urging I’ve gotten from people, I’ve never had any desire to partake.

The guy you describe above, makes me think of the MH370 captain.
 
Maurus said:
Honestly though there are some people that enjoy the job too much. I know a guy that is not only an airline pilot and still flies GA but will also load up MS Flight Sim and continue doing fake airline flights at home on his days off. That is too much for someone like me.
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That sounds like work outside of work. I know a few people who have awesome flight sim setups. I can’t hate it especially if it makes them happy.
 
Maurus said:
I enjoy this job because I enjoy flying. If you don't enjoy flying in general then you are going to be miserable.

Personally I haven't cared much about GA since I left it behind. I do keep my CFI stuff current but I haven't used it in over a decade.

I do pay attention to other aircraft out there and look them up if I don't know what they are. I don't read flying or AOPA magazine anymore since I don't find their stuff to be especially relevant to what I am doing.

Basically I am mixed bag. I enjoy aviation a ton. My focus is more airline specific these days. I do find myself thinking back to the fun of flying GA but I also think about the costs involved along with the reduction in safety. It is hard to justify when I already fly at a job I enjoy. Also, women still don't care that I am a pilot and I don't think owning a plane would change that 😅
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Hi, you are me, me is you
 
Eight years at the last job killed any possible love I could have left for flying. I show up to my 121 job (which I enjoy very much), fly my trips, volunteer time with the union, and go home. You won't catch me doing any GA on my time off and you certainly won't ever catch my ass in a single engine airplane.
 
It is a job, nuff said.

But with that being said, it is the best job I could ever possibly think of doing, and I can't believe the amount of money I get paid to do it. I eat, sleep and breathe flying. It is the great passion of my life and I am super thankful for each day that I get to enjoy it. It is those feelings that allow me to get past the suck of this career sometimes lol.
 
I’ve found as time goes on my interest in aviation is waning. I used to geek out more. Now most flights are kinda boring. I think I got spoiled when I had 9 months of no calls on long call.

One of my kids has shown an interest in learning to fly and wanting to do what I do. Flying GA has been fun again.
 
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