Career as a pilot isn't what it used to be

IRVING, Texas — Among the jobs little boys dream of — policeman, fireman, bulldozer driver — airline pilot long held the added virtue of satisfying grown-up dreams: pay that reached $300,000 a year, 20 days a month off work, the prestige of one day commanding a $200 million airplane, and a lush retirement at age 60.

But the airline industry's financial collapse this decade did away with much of that, leaving thousands of young men — and increasingly women — chasing a dream toward a disappointing reality.

"My wife thinks I'm nuts," said Jason Captain, 32, of Fort Worth who left the Navy last November, walking away from $75,000-a-year lieutenant's pay for flying military brass in and out of Guantánamo Bay.

Captain started training last month to fly a 76-seat regional jet for a Northwest Airlines subsidiary and expects to make about $21,000 his first year. Like most airline pilots, Captain had his heart set on flying "ever since I was a little kid," he said.

In recent years, he and his wife, June, were in the odd position of saving part of his military pay so they and their two sons could afford to have him work in the private sector. It could take him a decade to work his way back up to his former income.

He hopes, of course, to jump ultimately to the big jets at Northwest Airlines, where the most senior pilots can still make more than $150,000 a year, but there is no guarantee he will get there.

And, with the airline industry ready to go into another swoon because of high fuel prices, Captain and other junior pilots could find themselves furloughed along the way.

"You're much better off going into plumbing, from a purely financial perspective," said Ed Grogan, a financial planner in Gig Harbor, who has pilots among his clients.

The military is turning out fewer pilots, so aspiring aviators increasingly attend private flight schools, emerging with as much as $150,000 in student debt.

After Sept. 11, 2001, the biggest domestic airlines reduced their fleets by hundreds of planes, so they needed fewer pilots. And through actual and threatened bankruptcies, airlines managed to cut pilot pay by 30 percent or more. Many pilots lost big parts of their pensions. And work hours increased.

Certainly, top pay of $200,000 a year at the biggest airlines, down from $300,000, is still a nice living.

But cuts at the big airlines were just the beginning of the decline in pilot careers. The regional airlines, which pay far less than hub-and-spoke carriers even after the pay cuts, expanded to handle much of the flying that bigger airlines had abandoned. Many new pilot jobs are like the one Captain is taking, with a rock-bottom starting wage that creeps up slowly toward $100,000 a year.

Poor pay and fewer big-airline jobs to move up to have led to fewer applicants, creating a pilot shortage that is most acute overseas but also felt here.

Regional airlines have had to reduce their standards in hiring drastically. Earlier this decade, they could insist on a candidate's having a minimum of 1,500 hours of total flight time before an interview. Today, that minimum is 500 hours at many regional carriers, and the decline is contributing to safety concerns among some experts.

The seniority system — a new pilot starts at the bottom at most airlines, earning the lowest pay and getting the worst shifts — limits job-hopping. So choosing the right employer the first time around is crucial.

Captain, who looks forward to being called Capt. Captain, turned down a job at American Eagle Airlines, the regional division of American Airlines. It initially paid better, but the wait to upgrade to captain is 6 ½ years. At the Northwest regional carrier, Compass, which is growing, he could make captain in as little as one year.

But things change. Network carriers like United Airlines and Delta hire regional carriers, which are separate companies, to fly feeder routes from smaller cities into hub airports. But the big airlines renegotiate those contracts every few years, often switching regional carriers to reduce costs.

That means today's fast-growing regional airline could be laying off pilots tomorrow.