I am 17 years old and a junior in high school. i really want to be a pilot but the only thing that is holding me back from being 100% in is the schedule and work/life balance. i was wondering how much time a beginning pilot will get to spend at home. Also how often can a pilot bring a family member on a flight, and would it take a huge drop in my salary if I went to a local airline instead of a commercial airline so that I can be home at night,
Elijah,
I recommend taking a look at our schedules section on the forum, while Adam and Chris have some nice seniority at their company, Hannah has two different schedules over the previous years (one from a major and other regional) and myself from a regional. Roscoe also posts his schedule from another wholly owned regional from American. These should give you an idea on what a schedule can look like across a few companies.
You can expect to spend most of the holidays during the early stages of your career as the aviation industry operates around seniority. You want weekends off too? That may or may not happen, depends your base, seniority and time of year.
As for a family member onboard, it can happen, it has, but do recognize if they are waiting on the side as a standby and a revenue standby comes before them, they may not make your flight. Paying customers will generally take precedent unless there’s some magic out there that makes it work out. Sometimes we’re weight restricted (especially us little guys) and maybe we can take 1 person, but not a person and bag, so that standby without a bag may be the lucky one. There’s multitude of factors here that can make it or break it.
Not sure if you’ve seen articles, airline pilots are now in the top rankings for most earned income in the nation… FO’s are starting out near 6-digits.
Brady
Elijah,
Pilots by definition travel to far away places, this means significant time on the road. The first few years of the career, you should expect to spend up to eighteen days per month on the road. That will get better as you build seniority, but will start over each time you switch airlines.
Bring a family member on a flight can be tricky. There needs to be empty seats, or you need to purchase a ticket. Even then, things can change and you are beholden to the company, not your traveling partner. I once had a flight from Stockholm to the US cancel and my wife at the time really needed to get home. We had to buy a full fair ticket on British Airways and even then, that flight had issues and she got stuck in London.
I recently brought my wife on a Cancun flight and everything went great. We even had a mechanical emergency and she still made her connecting flight.
There really are no “local airlines”. There are regional airlines, but they still fly multi day trips and their pilots are gone just as much as major airline pilots, if not more. If you want to be a pilot, be prepared to spend many nights on the road.
Chris
Elijah,
If you’re wanting to be at home most nights, you would be severely limiting your job field but the beauty of this job is you can make it what you want. There are some part 135 jobs like air ambulance that work most nights and are home every day. As for airlines, Allegiant is known for mostly day trips with several bases across the country. Frontier just recently announced they have plans to shift to the day turn model similar to Allegiant. Only time will tell on that one…
Check out Allegiant’s website. On the front banner it says, "
With a growing fleet, several domiciles across the United States, and a business model that allows you to be home every night, Allegiant provides a one-of-a-kind opportunity to let you soar, both professionally and personally."
https://www.allegiantair.jobs/careers/pilots/
Hannah
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