If the copilot is removed, I’ll want to see a detailed, recent psychological and medical profile of the remaining pilot before buying a ticket.
I don’t think most passengers would care about a $385 vs. $386 price difference, not enough to compel the cost-saving move.
What do you fly?
I’m 27 and hoping to be a professional pilot by age 32 or 35, sigh. 
Oh, don’t worry about that. 
The bright idea *du jour *is to have a guy on the ground who’s connected by datalink and is watching about a dozen airplanes at once. If anything strange happens, he’s supposed to take over.
Color me just a tad skeptical.
You’d be amazed what folks will do for a dollar. I’ve had people tell me horror stories of getting a discount ticket with 4 stops and 4 plane changes that took 18 hours to get halfway across the country. I asked them how much they saved over a more direct routing and the answer’s usually about $10. “So how much did you spend on airport food & water during your four stops?” “Oh … heh, I didn’t think of that.” Morons.
B767 & B757 now. A whole slew of other things over the earlier years.
No matter what happens on the industry, the sooner you get in, the better off you’ll be. Hiring is going gangbusters now. 5 or 7 years from now the good deals will be mostly taken by more senior folks. So bust ass to get on board ASAP. Six months can be the difference between a great career and a crappy one.
IMO …
The impending near-term pilot shortage will mostly be solved by simply parking the smaller RJs. That still leaves plenty of open jobs replacing the folks who’ll be retiring in the late 20-teens through mid '20s.
The other wild card ahead is Congress again raising the mandatory retirement age. Almost everybody who’d planned / expected to only work to age 60 when that was the mandatory age have stayed on to 65 since the change. Only about 10% went earlier than 65 voluntarily. If Congress bumps it to 68 or 70 we’ll see fewer folks going all the way, but still a bunch. We will of course see more losses percentage-wise due to age-related disability.
Automating pilots out of existence will take long enough that there will still be work for a longer than you’ll need it. But …
When they eliminated flight engineers it removed about 1/4th of the industry pilot jobs over the course of the 15-ish years it took to replace the fleet. That didn’t do my career any favors. Looking ahead, as they introduce aircraft with one pilot on board, plus one fractional-pilot-by-proxy on the ground we’ll see the same kind of continuous headwind against advancement as the fleet switches over.
Don’t those RJs all fill a niche though? Presumably the ~100 seat jets are flying routes that can only sustain those passenger numbers. If you replace them with larger jets then you would presumably be running fewer flights which may make the locals unhappy. That would be ok if one carrier has a monopoly but if there are two or more carriers servicing a route, the one that persists with more frequent RJ services would come out ahead I would have thought.
That shouldn’t be a problem.
What do you really want to do and are you taking steps now to do it?
I ask what you really want to do because “professional pilot” is a broad job description and you could easily end up disappointed if you don’t identify what you actually want out of it. Some people really enjoy taking a load of people from A to B and seeing them get off at the terminal, they feel like they’ve achieved something. Personally that doesn’t interest me much, the presence or not of passengers or cargo makes no difference to my job satisfaction. I like the sensation of flying and of manually manipulating the controls to get the result I want. I also like having a task with a set of parameters and then completing it as accurately as I can. Flying from A to B on schedule, with minimal fuel burn / cost to the company, while adhering strictly to ATC, regulatory, and company requirements is what currently gives me job satisfaction. The “sensation of flying” and “manipulation of controls” bit got left behind with my previous job. Edit: And as that was my primary motivation for flying, I will probably never be as happy flying now and in the future as I was a few years ago. The schedule/fuel burn stuff is a consolation prize that keeps me amused but not fulfilled.
So identify what you really want out of it and then take steps, now, to do it. There will always be something in your life that seems to take priority over your aviation goals, always. There’s no point waiting to renovate the house, the kids to grow up a bit, the girlfriend to become your wife, the holiday to Switzerland, or whatever it is because while you’re waiting for each of those things there will be something else crop up that will become the new priority. Flying will forever stay at number 2 or 3 on your priority list.
In short, just make whatever sacrifices you need to, then get out there and do it. If you are already doing that, then good! Keep at it.
Bumping for an anecdote, and to add a note of thanks/satisfaction with having remembered this old thread: Recently retired Air France pilot just moved in as neighbor, talked about flying and this came up—by me, predominantly, so I could remember and be told again things about aeronautics.
Anyway, the most emotional he got, and how he concluded the conversation, was: “Airbus didn’t give a fuck in design; Boeing always designs for pilots first.”
Just throwing that out there.
I haven’t had the chance to read this entire thread yet so apologies if this has been mentioned before, but I recently watched this rather impressive video of an automatic recovery system in an American fighter plane: http://aviationweek.com/air-combat-safety/auto-gcas-saves-unconscious-f-16-pilot-declassified-usaf-footage
Would the installation of such a system in airliners be helpful, or useful in such a narrow and rare set of circumstances so as to not be cost effective?