What was the path like to your current career, and what parts would you recommend for or against another person following?
Feel free to be economic with the truth by using aliases for organizations and products wherever it protects your privacy or your contracts. I'm mainly interested to hear about your unique experience.
Example follow-up questions: What was most rewarding, what was not? What was not a great use of your time but maybe still a learning experience? What were you interested when you were younger (for hobbies or otherwise) that may have helped guide you?
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Pilot.
Went to college and learned to fly at the college flight school. Going to college isn't totally necessary but having a degree is helpful, going to a college flight school is a terrible idea, local mom and pop flight schools are faster and cheaper for equally good training. The worst mistake I made in my career was flight instructing at the college flight school after I graduated. It was in a bad weather state so I couldn't get a lot of hours, I was supposedly paid $21/hr but the way it was structured I averaged out at around $7/hr with no benefits as a 1099.
I got hired by a small cargo op in 2019. They'd hire me about 6 months earlier than when I would have qualified for a regional airline. It seemed like a questionable move at the time, but $50k to fly a little tiny jet seemed like a fortune. In retrospect it was a really good move when all my flight instructor friends got furloughed by the regional airlines when covid started. Normally I'd say airlines are the right move, but timing is everything.
After 3 years flying cargo I was tired of having my circadian rhythm get obliterated every week and I got hired to fly for a big bizjet company. Fun job, went to lots of cool airports and flew some interesting people, new hire pay was great, top end pay was terrible and the benefits were awful.
I got hired by one of the big US airlines in the hiring rush from 2022-23. Pay is amazing, benefits are really good, the work is somewhat boring but easy, and I have a strong union. 10/10 big airlines are great, I'm not leaving unless the company goes under, which is always a possibility. Now the only problem is that Boeing can't seem to get their shit figured out so the industry has stopped hiring again because there aren't enough new planes even though demand is fine.
TLDR: timing is everything.
Boy do I hear that.
I've always heard that the local/regional airlines are absolutely miserable in the pressure they put on pilots, but also the only good way to get a career started. Do you have a sense that the big airlines are looking to have any kind of rookie hire / training program, or are they content to use the regionals as a filter / feeder unit?
That's common in other countries, but I've never heard of any impetus to do it in the US. A lot of airlines have some sort of cadet program, but none that actually put any serious money into developing new pilots. For what it's worth, the hurdles in becoming a pilot are a big part of why being a pilot in the US is so much better than the rest of the world, there's a lot of benefit in being your own professional and not having the company own you in a training contract.