denverpilot
Tied Down
I agreed with a number of your statements, but this one just doesn't hold water. There's a significant number of members of THIS board who are younger and don't own businesses. They fly. A ton of younger folk at the local flight clubs too. Maybe a slightly older demographic at the Cirrus club. But any given weekend day I'm easily the oldest guy on the ramp at my hangar watching the kids and their instructors walking to airplanes.
I've also never met a Doc or Lawyer or small business owner who wasn't perennially on-call. I've also been on-call in one way or another my whole career. (Telecom and IT) On-call folks jus deal with it. My airplane co-owner owns a small biz. He has good staff and I've never seen him called more than a handful of times about things off-hours. He DOES get a few calls directly from clients and he takes those. But that's just normal.
I'm still convinced many of the things you mention (long hours, needing to impress the boss) are brought upon folks by themselves by the size and price of the things they buy. Not so much that they HAVE to work that hard, except that they wanted "stuff". In fact the Millennial crowd values "experiences" over "stuff" more than any generation since before mine. They're at the age now where they have some disposable income and due to the job market and lower initial incomes, many grew up quite frugal, so when they finally did start making good salaries, they're more willing to spend it on "adventures" rather than housing, cars, etc.
One of my co-workers and my little sister are certainly this way. Reasonable little cars that aren't very new, if they're single they still have roommates to keep housing down, etc. I've watched my co-worker get more and more interested in doing stuff and he's kept his expenses down as his salary has risen. He's not into airplanes, but he's taking regular ski trips and other travel and doesn't overspend. He bought an older townhouse and is starting to enjoy life. Same with my sis. Took her forever to get life started and she has a Masters in Architecture. Now she's doing great and we recall when she got the first "real job" she was still volunteering at a community garden to share in a bumper crop of fresh veggies. She joked that she still didn't realize she had money in the bank that she could just use to buy veggies. Ha.
They're a pretty resilient bunch. I see behaviors of MY parents and my wife's parents in them. One of the co-workers favorite past times is playing board games with friends or cards. He goes to a local pub who figured out this trend that has an entire wall full of them, and runs a couple of trivia contests per week, too. A lot of entertainment for very low dollars. He grabs a beer and a burger, hangs out with new people and plays games.
They're pretty resilient folk really. Their careers may not have taken off until they were 30, but they're making up for lost time. If. And it's a big if. They didn't sign up for massive debt. Or. They already got over it and sold off the toys and maybe even downsized the house or just busted butt to get raises and have some wiggle room above and beyond the mortgage.
The question is: Are there enough of them? Like I said on another post though, I see plenty of activity going on inside aviation, even if it's a lower number, everyone is busy. And I don't say that with any pie in the sky expectations of the CFI rating -- I don't need the job. But I don't see any instructors who are bored if they're going to the airport regularly.
I think your story is where we were a few years back, still sneaking out of a recession slowly, that no politician would say was one. But right at the moment, the younger crowd is showing up. Some of that is airline hiring driven. Quite a bit of it, probably. People didn't spend tens of thousands to train when they weren't, and that's changed. It'll change again, of course. Cycles. But right now, there's a number of right seat hopefuls training for things, too.
