Today I look at an airline pilot and think, “hey, cool uniform” and “hey, they get to fly around the world”. I’ve read articles saying that their wages have been declining through the years so that must dig into the prestige factor.
What really prompted me to submit this thread was the movie “Catch me if you can”. In that movie, pilots are portrayed as celebrities, with kids asking them for autographs, bank managers rolling out the red carpet, etc…
anyone care to fill me in?
cheers.
Yes, it used to be incredibly prestigious to be an airline pilot. That was back in the era people used to dress up to get on an airplane because it was a special thing - only the rich flew often, and it was expensive for regular folks. I somewhat remember those days…
Now - pilots are glorified bus drivers. At best. At least in the public eye.
(I also suspect that being a good bus driver takes more effort and skill than most people think, too)
A bit like steamboat pilots in Mark Twain’s day?
Maybe more. You can’t just press a button and have the bus park itself at the Port Authority.
You can’t just press a button and have the plane land itself, either. As I understand it, auto-pilots require considerable skill to configure and operate properly.
ETA: You do have a point, though. A bus driver routinely operates in an environment where a split-second of inattention can be disastrous. Most of a flight isn’t like that. Take-offs and landings, yah - but at cruising altitude? I suspect there’s very little that can go utterly, disastrously wrong in the space of seconds.
Yeah, but if it does go wrong, a skilled pilot lands in the Hudson with nary a fatality as opposed to crashing in the Bronx killing all onboard and quite a few on the ground.
Agreed.
My FIL was a captain for a major airline before he retired over 18 years ago. He considered himself a ‘glorified bus driver’ except that he said about once in every pilot’s career, they used all their training and skill and experience to prevent a disastrous outcome.
His turn came on a landing years ago, when he was quite close to the ground and a sudden microdownburst rotated him down sideways towards the runway. He was able to avert a crash, converting it into a very hard landing instead.
Was it harder to become a pilot in the 60s / 70s than it is today? Or was it a matter of there being less airlines / planes that made the career harder to get into?
Traditionally commercial airline pilots were ex Air Force or Navy pilots. They had received extensive training in the military and had logged a lot of flight hours. Then, they got civilian flight training to learn the airline planes.
The low pay is changing things. The military pilots make more staying in the military. A lot of them aren’t interested in flying for the airlines.
I was shocked at the inexperience of the pilots in the commuter plane that crashed in Buffalo a year ago.
Yes.
In fact, if you were a woman or black it was IMPOSSIBLE to become an airline pilot in the 1960’s and 70’s - large categories like that were barred from the job due to corporate bigotry that wasn’t overturned until the 1970’s and a lot of court cases.
Well clearly flying an airplane is much more complicated than driving a bus and much less forgiving of error.
Although I though I saw in Mythbusters where they demonstrated that with all the auto-pilot and computer aided functionality, it’s actually surprisingly easy for the tower to talk someone down 80s/90s action movie style.
Man, when I was a kid, I used to think pilots were the coolest guys in the world. Every time we’d fly, I’d ask my mom if I could [del]bug[/del] say hi to the pilot. We used to dress up to fly, too, and this was only in the 80s, so it’s not like I’m talking about times long gone here. I suspect kids still think pilots are cool, even if adults aren’t enamoured with them anymore. I was on the train some months ago, and at the airport stop, some kids (8 or 9 maybe?) seemed to be really excited about talking to the pilots. “Are you a pilot? Really? Do you fly everywhere?” They were way enthused.
I still think pilots are cool, but mainly because of that mellow, scratchy voice thing they do over the intercom.
Imho, being a pilot had a high status when the world was bigger, and going to say Japan or Europe was A Big Deal, and people who did it often were worldly-wise and had seen unbelievable mysteries. This is also cited as a reason why Princess Cruiselines used to inflame the imagination and the Love Boat was a top rated TV show.
Nowadays though, the mystery of foreign countries has been nearly eliminated thanks to the Internet. Personally, I would much rather read the Wiki page about a famous place. I feel like I get more out of it than actually going there.
A lot of it had to do with almost all commercial pilots being ex-military. Not just ex-military, but men (they were all male in those days) who had been in the military for 20 years (long enough to qualify for a pension) then switched over to airlines in their mid-40s. So they had an air of world-weary, been there done that, experience about them.
In the movie the OP mentions, not only was the character pretending to be a pilot, but a pilot for Pan Am. Pan Am was extra-special because at that time, the airline didn’t even fly inside the continental U.S. Everyone knew DiCaprio wasn’t just going to haul a bunch of tired businessmen from Chicago to Pittsburgh – he was on his way to London, Paris or Rome!
So, what’s a typical pay range for a pilot these days? I gotta believe, even with cuts, they make a nice wage. (not that they don’t earn it)
mmm
According to the book The Right Stuff, that was all down to (ex-) military pilots emulating Chuck Yeager’s famous style.
That’s only cool when done right. The very worst flight instructor that I’ve ever had sounded very annoying on the radio. (Just to be clear, he was really bad for lots of other more important reasons other than this.) He tried to do this smooth pilot talk thing every time he transmitted on the radio, only that it came out sounding more like a Hollywood actor trying too hard to sound like a pilot (and failing).
Which is tough to do when the plane being tested has ceased normal operations. You can hear the calm in Scully’s voice.
I’ve been told that at one time a captain in a major airline could buy a new Cadillac with every paycheck.
I here it used to be a vary prestigious job.