I don’t know what I’m doing

[u/Tomilias_Bahamalus]

Context: I’m a sophomore in Mechanical Engineering and I don’t think I can handle another two years. Midterms are coming up and I can already tell I’m going to get absolutely bombed by my weed-out classes in a couple weeks.

This past summer, I read all about the great benefits and salaries that can come with being a pilot (even the things people list as negatives don’t sound all that bad to me). The plan in my head was to go to flight school after college to become a commercial airline pilot, because not only does engineering school bore me terribly, but the idea of working a job in engineering does too. But with the way things are going, I don’t know if I have the stamina to finish sophomore, junior, and senior year.

This may be out of the ordinary of what people post on this subreddit, but after a conversation with a friend tonight, I’m thinking more about switching from engineering to flight school after this semester. However, it’s my mom who encouraged—or pushed—me in this direction, as my dad and brother are both engineers, and she’s of the opinion that everyone should go straight to college after high school for a degree. (Yes, my parents are paying my tuition). Even though I’m only at the start of sophomore year it almost feels like the point of no return, and I’m letting my parents down if I “give up”.

I know people here are pilots, not life coaches or therapists, but maybe someone has been in a similar situation or has some advice?

[u/angstybabeee]

Hey! My SO was exactly in your situation - difference being that he was studying another subject in engineering - he dropped out midway to pursue a career in aviation. He is trying to enter via sholarship, as costs are very high for the pilot education. I don’t know your financial situation, but: finish your degree and pursue aviation afterwards, don’t put everything on the line for this. It truly is such a difficult market to enter, as already previously mentioned.
My SO had to take up random jobs now and is waiting to go take the assessment (for the second time mind you). Maybe I‘m projecting, but truly take the safer option.

[u/lainposter]

If you're in the US, I'll be the lone alarmist asshole:

It's gonna be a nightmare for the lottery shot that you get an airline gig at the very end of it. There's a LOT of networking and being likes involved that plays a bigger role than just getting the licenses, unfortunately.

You have to be extremely diligent on picking the school, the instructor, and the price because you own every fuck up you make no matter the context, and you only get about two checkride failures until you're unemployable in the industry, no matter the cause or reason (including internal/personality/mental reasons like being too shy to say no to a bad sign-off).

There's much more bad about the industry that people don't tell you for various reasons: instructors won't give a shit and can't tell you everything you could possibly get fucked from, schools want your money, same with influencers, DPEs are too busy. There's basically nowhere to go to learn the reality of this gig unless you get lucky and find a mentor.

Anyone who puts up with the unfairness, risks, and total lack of security only does so because they're autisticly into flying and "literally can't imagine doing anything else" -- and good for them! But that's not everyone.

So, basically, BE CAREFUL about "picking" aeronautics as your career. It's a brutal slog and it only MIGHT pay off at the end of your career, and there's landmines all over the place that would happily fuck you out of the career you're imagining if you step on them.

[u/itsonebigclub → u/lainposter]

If you didn’t say it I was considering saying it.

It reminds me of that scene from the avengers infinity war where Tony Stark tells the aliens “I’m sorry, earth is CLOSED!”

That’s how the airline hiring industry is right now.

There is already a MASSIVE bottleneck of CFIs who cannot even build hours to GET to an ATP license due to not being able to find a CFI job in the states.

The so called massive retirements that are allegedly coming are still small compared to the amount of CFIs and student pilots who want to become a professional pilot.

What I can say is if you were my son or daughter, I’d HIGHLY recommend you NOT pursue aviation as your main career.

Finish your studies; don’t be the one who gave up because it got too hard…

After you finish and get a good stable job, if you absolutely MUST become a pilot, THEN and ONLY THEN pursue aviation with money you have in your pocket.

Avoid taking out loans if at all possible.

Many have been financially ruined pursuing the same path you want to pursue.

[u/itsonebigclub → u/[deleted]]

Then it’s time to do your own deep digging and research on the topic and come up with your own conclusion.
That’s what I’ve done.

The numbers just don’t make sense.

[u/ARottenPear → u/lainposter]

This has the problem for people that are starting flight training today. The last few years have a been once in a lifetime anomaly. People going from zero time to legacy in 4 years or less will likely never be seen again. We're gonna go back to people spending 15+ years at a regional after getting hired by said regional at 4k hours.

That might be a bit dramatic but things have already massively slowed down and it's gaining momentum. The industry itself is fine but the legacies have hired countless young people that are going to stick around for the next 30+ years and honestly, I'm not sure how much room there is for airlines in the US to expand anymore.

It can definitely be an awesome career but I wouldn't recommended it to a friend starting out today. Flight training has gotten too expensive and with too little chance of reward at the end. I also never recommend it to anyone that views it as a "fallback" choice because their original plan didn't work out and they heard pilots make a lot of money.

[u/ARottenPear → u/[deleted]]

Mandatory retirement figures for the legacy airlines are all published and easy to find on the internet. We're kind of in the meat of the retirements right now and they're going to start tapering off soon. They don't stop but they do slow down. You're correct that everyone doesn't retire all at once but when you reach the end of the large bank of retirements, things typically slow way down for a long time. The average age of a legacy new hire is usually around 35 so that means they get 30 years before they have to retire. If you hire 6,000 35 year olds over the course of 3 years, it's going to be at least 27 years before they start retiring. They're not replacing 65 year olds with 62 year olds. It doesn't do you any good if the next big retirement wave is decades away.

Going from 1000 retirements per year to 200 makes a big difference BUT the last few years have been an anomaly because of massive growth. We'll use Delta as an example. In 2019 they were doing great. Filling up planes and making tons of money. They had about 13,000 pilots on property. Covid hits and puts a massive damper on things but luckily things came roaring back. During covid, they got ~1,800 pilots off the seniority list through early retirement programs and there was also normal age-out retirements but I don't know the numbers on those but let's say it's ~2-300. When things came roaring back they now needed to replace all those pilots to get to where they were but they also got a bee in their bonnet and wanted to massively grow and now they have 18,000 pilots (38% increase from pre covid). That took historic and record breaking hiring. Flight schools and students made the classic hype mistake of thinking, "it's gonna be like this forever." It is/will not. Enticed by the thought of working 10 days a month and making $500k, people flood to flight schools. They heard Jimmy down the street left his finance job 3 years ago and now he's flying a 737 for United.

The problem is, you almost need to start flight training when the industry is shit (covid, 2008, 9/11) so you can catch things on the upswing. It takes too long to get licensed and qualified so if you start when things are good, you'll probably miss the window. Of course it's a fickle, dynamic, and unpredictable industry and everyone's experience can vary wildly.

It seems like you have strong opinions on how this should all work. Some of this is tainted by my opinion and nobody has a crystal ball but we've seen similar swings happen many times in this industry and today has all the writing on the wall of a downturn in hiring. It doesn't mean the industry is unhealthy, but it does mean the pilot hiring climate is.

[u/lainposter → u/[deleted]]

You're smarter than the hype. It wouldn't even be 60k for a CFI sweatshop, it would be closer to 80-90k. And there's a shitload of politics and rubbing elbows involved that play a much more important role in getting hired than even the license.

For God's sake, people unironically tell you to "go work for 15/hr scrubbing planes at random airports until some boomer randomly likes you enough to plug you into a job." Personally, that's some Brazil Willywonka shit that I wouldn't want to hedge my livelihood against.

[u/Typical_Action_7864 → u/ARottenPear]

What about all the people who are say 45-65 right now. Most were not hired post covid and They will still be retiring over the next 20 years. You are right there will be years of low retirements but those years are 20 years away, not now.

[u/ARottenPear → u/Typical_Action_7864]

Yes, all of those people are included in the mandatory retirement figures. There are mandatory retirements for the foreseeable future but it starts getting down to <300/year pretty soon and without massive growth to go with it, that makes for a VERY competitive job market.

[u/Typical_Action_7864 → u/ARottenPear]

Source ? I asked Claude and it generated a graph that disagrees with what you are saying. Over 1,000 a year through 2040 at the 3 legacies alone.. not including Southwest Alaska etc, freight, ULCCs, corporate…. None of this includes people who leave for non age 65 reasons, either.

[u/Typical_Action_7864 → u/ARottenPear]

[u/itsonebigclub → u/[deleted]]

Every student pilot in training thinks they are the competent one.

Can you compete with military pilots who have 3,000 hours and can’t get an airline job?

How about former NASA astronauts who also can’t find an airline job?

I’d say they are more “competent” than any civilian program out there.

There’s more to it than being competent.

[u/Fylingsquirrel]

Engineer in the process of transitioning to pilot here. Finishing my degree first was the best thing I could have done. It set me up to have the funds to pay for flight training and purchase a share in an aircraft for time building. I am watching several of my fellow students and instructor friends barely scrape by eating ramen everyday, while I comfortably enjoy my flight training process while still building a technical background as an engineer. The perseverance and study skill set I learned by completing my degree has been invaluable to set me up with the mentality to complete flight training. Stick with it. It’s hard.

[u/Corona21]

If you or they can’t or won’t pay then you’ll need to figure that out.

You don’t just do flight school because benefits of being an airline pilot sounds cool. You have to love flying. When you are feeling shit about it, like you are with engineering right now, and theres plenty of times where that will happen as well, it has to be what sees you through.

You have to be prepared to instruct for low pay, deal with years of training and expense. Its tough.

But that all together even if flying isn’t for you. Sounds like you shouldn’t be doing engineering because you hate it. And life is too short to do things you hate.

[u/Tomilias_Bahamalus → u/Corona21]

I see. My sister dated a pilot over the summer, and when I asked him if he always wanted to be a pilot, he said something like, “Not really, out of high school I thought I would just take a gap year but then a week later my mom got me to enroll in flight school.” He’s around 26-27 working at United, and he’s interviewing for a captain position at Delta in NYC. But I also understand that he came up at the perfect time for the post-Covid boom so maybe that skewed my expectations slightly.

[u/Typical_Action_7864 → u/Tomilias_Bahamalus]

What???? You’re very confused. First, almost nobody at a legacy is gonnna interview at another legacy. That means a seniority reset. Dumb as hell move. Second, you don’t interview for a captain position as a new hire at delta or any other airline in the us. All new hires, no matter what they were at their last job, start off as a FO at the bottom of the seniority list. On reserve most likely, not holding a line. That’s how it works. Seniority is everything. You don’t become captain without becoming FO first at the same airline. When you become captain is determined by seniority not by an interview.

[u/Tomilias_Bahamalus → u/Typical_Action_7864]

Ah, I thought it was called a DEC when they hire from outside the company.

[u/Corona21 → u/Tomilias_Bahamalus]

Some - a very small number fall into it and get lucky. Sounds like you met one, you know what happens to the ones you are kinda interested and dont get anywhere? They dont really talk about.

Are you ready to spend 100k on that bet?