I am just wondering how the lifestyle of a professional pilot meshes with being a family man, helping raise kids, being there for them when they need you, and so on.
::channeling my inner denverpilot::
I’m a day late and a dollar short to this, but I was on the road and wanted to wait until I got back to a real computer to reply. I'm not a fan of typing a lot from an iPad. But it gave me time to think about it a bit, and you can see from the two pages of replies that you got a wide variety of responses. I'll speak to the airline experience, but as you can tell from your replies, there are a lot of ways to skin the professional pilot cat, the airlines being just one of them.
The airline gig is one with the potential for an incredible amount of flexibility. That's part of what makes it so desirable. Every month I bid a schedule that supports the kind of life I want at home. I can then move trips around once my schedule is in place. I can drop trips and be home more if I’m willing to make a little less that month, then pick up trips and fly my ass off the next month if I want the fat check. If I *really* want to whore out for the money, I can sacrifice predictability and go grab ‘premium’ trips - ones where the company gets in a staffing bind and is willing to pay a bunch more for someone to step up and fly it. And every month, I can play it completely differently depending on my needs. Of course the specific extent of that flexibility is determined by the pilot’s seniority in that seat (i.e. ORD 737 FO, LAX 320 CA, etc), but even the junior guys have choices to make.
So with this flexibility, it’s entirely possible for an airline pilot to make choices that result in a home life that is the envy of every other parent/spouse on the block with a regular 9-5 job. Many do. I fly with people all the time that have fantastic marriages with great relationships with their kids. It’s not uncommon at all, and if your son is serious about having a rock solid family life, there is nothing stopping him from doing so as an airline pilot. It’s just that all that flexibility creates an environment where you’re constantly faced with the ability to make more money if you’re willing to sacrifice your schedule to do it. And frankly, a lot of us are p!ss poor at managing the balance of being home and going out and fattening our wallets at any cost. Lemme give you an example:
A salaried office worker and an airline pilot both have the week of Thanksgiving off. The office worker goes home to his family and thinks no more about it. The airline pilot plans to be home, but that Monday gets offered a premium trip that’ll have him gone from Tuesday through Friday. His thought process goes like this:
“Twenty four hours of pay at 200%…with per diem that’s like (gets out the calculator) - that’s $12,000! Hell, think of what we could do with that cash! And crap, with the company DC into my 401(k), that’s almost another two grand right there. The wife and kids won’t mind if I’m gone this one time - after all, they benefit from the money too. Besides, I’ll be home by the weekend.” So now he’s justifying all sorts of things to go chase the money. And if he goes even further down the rabbit hole, he begins to feel that by *not* picking up the trip, he’s essentially *paying* over $12K for the ability to be home. I see this kind of thought process all the time. Usually a year later this guy will be spotted in the bar bragging to his buddies that he cleared $400K as an FO, but then ***** about how hard the job is on his family.
Another example, but this one doesn’t involve money, and it’s a personal one. My girlfriend is a doctor in her first year of a surgical residency. Her assigned hospital was in a different city than where we were living before, but fortunately also in a city where my airline has a base. The new base doesn’t have the kind of airplane I’m flying now, so I had to bid something different. What I wanted to bid was the 767/757 (well *really* the 777, but I’m still a couple years too junior). I’ve always wanted to fly the 757, but they’re getting older and therefore going away eventually, so the time is now if I want to do it. Unfortunately my seniority in that airplane wouldn’t be so great. I’d be bouncing between a line holder and a reserve - probably getting some of the days off I wanted if I were willing to sit reserve, but have a garbage schedule if I preferred the predictability of a line. If I were single, or had a girlfriend with a regular job, I’d still be all over it. But my girlfriend’s schedule is nuts. Six days a week at 12 hours a day minimum, and she doesn’t get her schedule until a day or two prior to the start of the month. So flexibility on my part is key, and I’m not sure that I’d have the flexibility I’d need on the 767/757. So therefore I bid the 737. It was the right decision, but the pilot inside me kicked and screamed the entire time. Believe me, it’s still p!ssed as hell. Not that the 737 is a bad airplane, but it’s not a 757, and instead of laying over in Europe and South America, I’ll be yet again overnighting in many of the domestic cities I’m already familiar with. But on the flip side, I’ll have the kind of seniority to pretty much build my monthly schedule any way I’d like, and then modify it to maximize my time with my girlfriend once she knows what her month looks like.
Anyway, I used this example to illustrate that it wasn’t an easy call to make, even though I knew it was the right one. I think a lot of us say we’d choose QOL all the time, every time, but when faced with a pile of cash in our face, a shiny cool piece of equipment, the 4th stripe, or whatever - it’s not as easy as we’d like to think. The flexibility of an airline job waves these kinds of decisions in our face all the time, and many of us don’t handle it well at all. And IMO, it’s that failure that’s responsible for the difficult lifestyle stereotype. That same flexibility wielded properly can create awesome family situations that I witness all the time. Unfortunately, like anything else, it’s the negative stuff that defines the narrative.
In the 121 and 135 scheduled flight world you are correct.
