Average pay for SWA $300k by 2020

While we're at it, favorite Engineer quote: "I understand that aerospace documentation can be hard to understand just because Engineers had written them... and Engineers are generally not good writers." LOL
 
These articles are often comically biased towards the best case scenario.

Probably the best way to calculate an annual income is to take the hourly rate, and multiply it by 1000. That will put you in a reasonable ballpark for a pilot who occasionally picks up an extra trip. 900 is more accurate for someone who goes to work, flies their trip and goes home with minimal futzing.

All of this pales in comparison to the salary, benefits and work rules as they used to exist prior to 2004. Only now are pay rates starting to get to where they were 15 years ago, and that's on a NON-inflation adjusted basis.

Most, if not all majors had a defined benefit retirement plan, that usually paid out 60% of your final earnings average after a 25 year career retiring at 60. Those plans have all been terminated or frozen, replaced by defined contribution plans that are in no way equivalent.

Most health insurance was paid. Zero cost to the pilot.

No denying it. In 2000, the job at a major was a good deal. There were a LOT more majors and cargo operators, and the pathway to get there more assured without the risk or cost. Zero to hero cost about $15k all in, including living expenses. 2 years as a CFI, 1 year flying freight, 3-5 years at a regional, and you were there at a major at 28-30 if you were a reasonable stick and kept your nose clean.

Now it's a just an OK deal, but its far more expensive, much less assured, and the dwell period at the regionals much, much longer. With the industry consolidation, there are far fewer opportunities.

The collapse of the "good deal" at the majors has rippled through the entire industry. I won't say that it caused a partial collapse in GA, but certainly kids can see the writing on the wall. Without people cycling through the pipeline, the regionals can't staff. Their model has always been built around relatively inexpensive training and experience building at the GA level. Pilots were willing to deal with the hassle and low pay because the tenure would be relatively brief. Now that that is not the case, and there is a lack of pilots willing to do it for that compensation level, and that's no surprise

Without career track pilots, that puts a serious damper on the flight school circuit.

Of course there are ancillary problems in the industry...lots of them, and probably a good dose of generational issues. None of those help.

Richman
 
denverpilot said:
Don't know how I missed this thread, but that above made me laugh.

I counted eight engineers I know personally outside of PoA who make that number and aren't software engineers.

Four have college degrees. Only one would be considered "pedigreed", he's an RPI grad. Two their degree isn't in anything technical at all. The other four have high school diplomas only. All have been forced at one time or another to wear a manager title but only one pursued management roles. She's a girl who knew she likes to be the boss. Ha.

The thing they all have in common is they build things and fix things worth billions. And high risk projects are their staple diet, and six of them at one time or another traveled extensively to learn and hone their craft.

One pre-negotiated a severance package worth $1M and it paid out, when one of the prototypes he designed and built of a massive system the government was thinking about bidding on, died politically. Then he traveled to China and built them something similar but not quite the same from similar tech making more than double your $200,000 number. He "slowed down" by buying a large multi-state business so he didn't have to travel any more than a few hundred miles away on a regular basis. Ha.

My career is similar but I specialized in fixing and troubleshooting. I was the guy we jokingly called the "appeasement engineer". I showed up in less than 24 hours domestically to fix your telecom stuff worth millions (instead of billions) and later did similar in the data center world. I make a bit less than the above folks do and find that to be just fine. I would go when nobody else could or would. Like, get your bags and see if there's a flight out tonight kind of go.

And I backed off and stopped traveling years ago and chose to focus on smaller businesses who needed a jack-of-all-trades type of engineer to fix a lot of varied infrastructure stuff. Heck I even reprogrammed the lights in the office to come on and go off at appropriate times last year when nobody else would go get the manual and figure it out. Heh.

On paper, I have a high school diploma too. I fall into that "some college" category on surveys because I was traveling too much to finish.

High paid engineering is way more about initiative and building/fixing than sitting in an office 8-5. You gotta GO build or fix.

One of those guys above has no formal education in electronics. You should see the stuff he builds for his house, just screwing around. Fingerprint readers, integrated security system, all integrated with all the TVs and phones, he's a nut. He posts photos of "this week's" project on FB.

That's a common thread also. Such an interest in building stuff that they build regularly just for fun.

I like integrating stuff already built into strange and new things. It's subtly different than what they do. I know how to lay out a board and develop a circuit and make stuff, but it doesn't hold my interest as much as say, taking a pre-built widget and making it do something it wasn't intended to do. Different mindset. Different salary too, but not a bad one at all.

Plus for whatever reason my company kept me around when I said I wanted to take a leave of absence or resign to go play airplanes for the summer. Awfully nice of them. I still don't know why, but it feels like a pretty big pat on the back for the work done over the last couple of years. They could still decide to let me go at any time, but I'm grateful they didn't. Ironically for almost two decades getting time off was the hardest thing in my life. All of a sudden I say I'm cool with quitting and I now nearly come and go as I please. It's very weird to me.

(Obviously I went from salaried to hourly during this summer of aviation fun, so my income won't be what it was, but I'm just floored that they let me do it. I'm still technically "on-call" for anything major that breaks, but a lot of the upgrades and fixes we did over the last two years made stuff a whole lot more redundant and resilient and most of it "just runs" even when hardware breaks. Not all. Yet. But most of the really important stuff for business continuity.)
Click to expand...

The thing is all those guys and yourself are probably a lot smarter than I am. Idk - I worked my butt off in engineering school and I did quite well...but I'm not one of these people who is just naturally brilliant.
 
Richman67 said:
These articles are often comically biased towards the best case scenario.


Most, if not all majors had a defined benefit retirement plan, that usually paid out 60% of your final earnings average after a 25 year career retiring at 60. Those plans have all been terminated or frozen, replaced by defined contribution plans that are in no way equivalent.


Richman
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Not true. FedEx, UPS, and Alaska have defined benefit plans.
 
UAE 666 said:
Any infrastructure required is going to be less than the hassle with dealing with a unionized blue collar workforce with a high hourly rate. People are expensive. In every single industry where there has been a way to replace people with automation there has been a reduction in cost. People are slow, weak and can only work for 8 or fewer hours a day and need support when they are not working. They have medical and other expenses. As a business owner if I hire a person, I have to pay social security and medicare matching even before other things like retirement planes, 401K matching, etc. In the aviation industry pilots are unionized which is a huge headache. That all goes away by replacing those meat puppets with automation that PERFORMS BETTER. Even if a human operator is working at their peak, they are slow. A computer based system has a reaction time measured in microseconds. People react, if you're lucky, in half a second but more typically two seconds.

It makes no sense having people fly planes. Right now there is a psychological barrier that has prevented true automation but that is ending. Automation is coming.

We will still have human operators flying planes but only in GA. Smaller operators using older planes and also the recreational flyers.
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Meat puppets huh? What is the point of an automated society if you're unwilling to cover the cost of living of the idle? Otherwise its a tomato tomMAto kinda thing. You gotta incur the cost either way. Humans may be slow, but theyrr not gonna die off without making it hard for the winners of the automation race to enjoy their spoils. Can't have the cake and eat it too I'm afraid, your clear contempt for human beings notwithstanding. I'm with @Sluggo63 on this one. My bet is on us cumbersome weak and slow meat puppets will continue to fly airliners by the time you're compost.
 
CC268 said:
The thing is all those guys and yourself are probably a lot smarter than I am. Idk - I worked my butt off in engineering school and I did quite well...but I'm not one of these people who is just naturally brilliant.
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Nah. One is brilliant. Most are just persistent as hell. Including me. Stubbornly so. "This thing is going to work if it kills me..." Ha.
 
As any of the airline types here can tell you, what is reported is FAR from reality.
I can give you my hourly rate, my schedule and my new contract and 99% of you would not be able to tell me what my next paycheck will be. My best friend has been at United for thirty years and I have been at my cargo company thirty years...his hourly was very slightly more than mine but my W2 is always about 30 grand higher and I do NOT fly extra. The devil is in the finely worded details.

There are so many variables that make a look from the outside look one way but in reality is exactly opposite. Truth. At my company, we have first officers making 300 plus...and No, it is not Fed Ex.
 
It's all in the route, what can Brown do for you? But if it is Brown, I dont think they've operated their own aircraft 30 years yet... close.
 
In ultrasonic testing it denotes signal amplification (called "gain") as seen on CRT or "A" scan. A 6db increase in gain causes a signal to double, -6db reduces a signal by 1/2. Which, I'm sure was developed by Engineers.
 
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GlennAB1 said:
In ultrasonic testing it denotes signal amplification (called "gain") as seen on CRT or "A" scan. A 6db increase in gain causes a signal to double, -6db reduces a signal by 1/2. Which, I'm sure was developed by Engineers.
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Apparently an ultrasonic engineer is only half an engineer.
 
dans2992 said:
Depends on what kind of engineering. I know some making double that or more.... Of course, they've moved up into management at that point and work in Silicon Valley.
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at about the 120K point on the east coast engineering turns to Engineering Management at every place I have seen. So if you want to be in the thick of it without the hassle of the people factor you will have to stay around there. I don't really find anything wrong with that. but hey flying airliners for double that does not sound too shabby at all!
 
Checkout_my_Six said:
What is this dB stuff you guys speak of?
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When old man Bell was inventing the telephone, he needed some way of quickly and efficiently measuring the "loudness" of his telephone signal. He picked a hundred people at random and asked them to tell when the sound apparently doubled in volume. He called the average of that the "Bell" (shy person that he was). When we got into the fine grain of measurement, the Bell was WAY too big to express our terms, so we took one-tenth of a Bell which is a deci-Bell. We later dropped the last "l" and it came out decibel, which we abbrvt dB.

When we started to apply the mathematics to it, we came up with two expressions, one for voltage and one for power. Since the equation for power (power = voltage SQUARED divided by resistance) it turns out that when you do the equations for decibel, you find that the ratio of voltage dB to power dB is exactly two to one.

Another way of saying this is that doubling (or halving) the power results in a change of 3 dB and doubling (or halving) the voltage results in a change of 6 dB.

When I said the salary power (POWER, remember) of an average engineer was -6 dB of a $300k salary, I was saying that the average engineer was making half of half of $300k, or $75k.

Jim
 
weirdjim said:
When I said the salary power (POWER, remember) of an average engineer was -6 dB of a $300k salary, I was saying that the average engineer was making half of half of $300k, or $75k.

Jim
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Yeah, but since "Engineers are generally not good writers"... when you wrote:
weirdjim said:
You are about -6dB in money power off.
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Pertaining to this:
Checkout_my_Six said:
Don't all engineers make $200k or more?
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It could be taken differently.
 
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avongil said:
at about the 120K point on the east coast engineering turns to Engineering Management at every place I have seen.
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There are 2 types of Engineering orgs:

a) Those who promote their best Engineers to managers, because they need to do that to justify paying them more.
b) Those who promote their worst Engineers to managers, since that's where they can do the least damage.

I've worked in both but I prefer (b). Working with incompetent managers is amusing. Working with incompetent engineers is depressing.
 
MD11Pilot said:
As any of the airline types here can tell you, what is reported is FAR from reality.
I can give you my hourly rate, my schedule and my new contract and 99% of you would not be able to tell me what my next paycheck will be. My best friend has been at United for thirty years and I have been at my cargo company thirty years...his hourly was very slightly more than mine but my W2 is always about 30 grand higher and I do NOT fly extra. The devil is in the finely worded details.

There are so many variables that make a look from the outside look one way but in reality is exactly opposite. Truth. At my company, we have first officers making 300 plus...and No, it is not Fed Ex.
Click to expand...

Heck, with all the trading, swapping and picking up I do, half the time I can't really tell for sure what my next pay check will be.
 
deonb said:
There are 2 types of Engineering orgs:

a) Those who promote their best Engineers to managers, because they need to do that to justify paying them more.
b) Those who promote their worst Engineers to managers, since that's where they can do the least damage.

I've worked in both but I prefer (b). Working with incompetent managers is amusing. Working with incompetent engineers is depressing.
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Damn, I may have found a new favorite Engineer's qoute.
 
avongil said:
at about the 120K point on the east coast engineering turns to Engineering Management at every place I have seen. So if you want to be in the thick of it without the hassle of the people factor you will have to stay around there. I don't really find anything wrong with that. but hey flying airliners for double that does not sound too shabby at all!
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I'd agree with this. I'd say top out for 90% of the strictly engineers in my area is about 120k.
 
Discussing a logarithmic scale in this thread is overkill when a 6" (linear) ruler is more than sufficient.

weirdjim said:
...I was saying that the average engineer was making half of half of $300k, or $75k.
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While statistics and I disagree with your numbers for the generic 'engineer' (you're ~20K+ low according to the BLS, AIAA, and ASME for starters, even farther off by IEEE), what's the average salary for the generic 'pilot'? I'll even spot you 'commercial pilot'.

Nauga,
subverting the dominant paradigm
 
I am seeking advice in preparing to fly for a second career. I can retire in two years (from an education career) at the age of 47 with a defined benefit of approximately 135k a year. I have my PPl and am instrument rated and current. I am working on my SEL commercial and hope to finish my MEL commercial w/instrument privileges by Christmas. I have contimplated getting my CFI and building hours over the next two years to prepare for a second career. I am not sure if I want to spend 5-8 years at the regionals to make it to the majors, I believe the corporate/charter work is more appealing. I do love to fly and would enjoy a second career in aviation. Any advice???
 
KSCessnaDriver said:
MMMTO (Max Money, Max time off) is what I look for.
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Well good luck with that :D QOL and fun, challenging work are weighted as heavily in my equation. Sometimes QOL has taken a back seat to other factors but I've always enjoyed my work. Some of you have enjoyed it too, whether you know it or not. ;)

Nauga,
and what he does in the shadows
 
"It's all in the route, what can Brown do for you? But if it is Brown, I dont think they've operated their own aircraft 30 years yet... close."

Officially, January 1,1988 but they used contractors for several years prior operating their aircraft for them. You're correct in the close comment. The most I ever flew at a passenger carrier was 950 hours. The most here was 450. Just finished a vacation period from June 25 to Sept 1. Each company is very different. My company uses a 28 day month so I get 13 months of pay and this year I will probably not exceed 300 hours hard time. I won't say what my W2 will be but I am not on welfare.
 
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