Quoted:
LT is a good program, and my God can those boys Drink!!  A great ethos down there.  Getting your private this summer is a good plan, stick your toe in the water so to speak.  If you aren't feeling it (it won't get easier) bail early.

As for whether this career is a good plan or not, that's tough.  A little more than a year ago, I was getting paid well to fly a fantastic jet for a great company, sit on the beach in Cancun, pina colada in hand, thinking this is the greatest job in the world.  It felt like a barely worked.

Now, a year later, 11 years after I got my private and 9 years of professional flying, I'm a junior B1900 captain on reserve, making 29k/yr.  I haven't seen a weekend at home in months.  To get days off I bribe schedulers with whiskey or resort to plain old deception, since I have no seniority.  I look forward to overnights in hotspots like Manhattan, KS cause there's a little college there.  Joplin, MO because the Holiday Inn gives us free beer.  Dread getting stuck in Dodge City, KS, as the hotel smells like Hoffa is buried under the floorboards, It's either hot/windy or cold/windy, and the town always smells like cowshit.  I love the job, but hate the company, half the passengers, and a quarter of the shitholes we serve.  I'm one of the lucky ones, because a) I have a job. And b) I'm in the left seat again.  

My opinion is a twisted, conflicted one.  Part of me says I could never do anything else for a living, and I'm still excited to go to the airport.  The other part wants desparately to warn you to stay away.  Probably no help at all.

Quoted:
Wow, Pontius. Plowing the skies of my home state  You have a good idea of why I don't reside there

For the moment I am living the Pt 91 dream. Good pax, good plane, cool destinations.

Thankful every day.

And if it all ended tomorrow, I'd head to the airport to apply for whatever they have.

As for the original post...how deep is aviation in you? If you're just dabbling in aviation, you may not like what's out there...

Quoted:
I actually would not wish an airline job on anyone except an enemy. Airline flying today is an exercise in futility. Flying the airplane is just a tiny part of the long days. There's the commute to domicile. There's the night in the motel (where hopefully you aren't mugged). There's the trip to the parking lot (where hopefully you aren't mugged). There's the ride in the bus to the terminal (that you hopefully survive). There's the bag-drag (actually I never used a sissy trailer even once..real pilots should carry their own shit IMHO) to the pilot lounge. There's the ritual of revisions. Next is my most favorite part...the inevitable encounter with T-fucking,S-fucking, A-fuckers!!!!!!!!!! After that little treat, and if your heart hasn't exploded or you haven't been arrested, you can finally get to the airplane if you can find somebody with an electronic door key and a union card that allows them to operate the jetway. Hopefully this will occur without an alarm going off and another pleasant encounter with security or T-fucking, S-fuckin, A-fuckers.  After preflighting the A/C and if there isn't some enfuckment with boarding the most pleasant and delightful hoards of passengers, and if ATC or weather doesn't have a surprise for you, you can get in line with all the other crews doing the same thing that you are doing and wait your turn to push the go fast levers forward.  After complying with the directions of ATC and not violating some FAR or Company directive or having done something wrong on one of the recorders you can park at a gate and wait for someone with the correct union card to operate the jetway. After unloading and reloading the cabin with the most pleasant hoards of diverse and hopefully recently bathed passengers you get to repeat the entire ritual one more time unless one of the diverse flight attendants has a problem with one of the diverse passengers and you have to take a delay while security or T-fucking, S-fucking, A-fuckers sort out the issues. Now your thirty minutes late for the rest of the day. Repeat this dick-dance as required until your two hours late reaching your overnight destination or you have been rerouted to another garden spot for the overnight at the Ritz Carlton. Stand in front of the terminal for forty five minutes in the heat and exhaust fumes waiting on the crew van from the Ritz Carlton being driven by Lemonjello, a convicted felon on parole, that drives like a fucking mad man with bling and a NY Yankees hat two sizes too big cocked at a 45 degree angle  and speaking in a jive tongue that is not understandable. After surviving the the ride to hotel wait another 15 minutes to sign in at the front desk where Fatima can't figure out which rooms are ready for the crews. After receiving your room key from Fatima walk all the way to the back of the motel to your room next to the dumpster, railroad track, hot tub, vending machine, ice machine and elevator where you find out that you key will not open your door. Taking all your bags with you, return to the front desk and try to get Fatima to run your key card back through the highly complicated machine so that you can go all the way to the back of the motel again and get into your room. After starting to unpack in your room and discovering that the aircondioning or heat or hot water doesn't work in this room you call the front desk to get another room. You pack all your shit back up and go to the front desk again to deal with the genius known as Fatima. When you finally get settled into your room for the handicapped and go to the crapper you discover that your feet will not touch the floor. While on the crapper your legs go to sleep and you almost die in the following fall. (I must be tall enough) The airconditioner works in this room, but makes sounds like a broken Maytag washing machine each time it cycles waking you up all night long. At 2330 hours a loud group of drunks goes by your room and wakes you up. At 0100 hours a train comes by and wakes you up. At 0200 hours gunshots and a siren wake you up. At 0300 hours a drunk calls your room waking you up, he thinks your his buddy Bill. At 0400 hours the garbage truck with the reverse claxon is emptying the dumpsters banging them on the truck and ground and waking you up. At 0430 hours Fatima mistakingly calls your room and wakes you up, she thinks you are a flight attendant named Jill. At 0500 hours your wake up call doesn't come because you changed rooms last night. Your cell phone alarm saves you.  You decide to go to the motel cafe for coffee and breakfast since the coffee maker in your room is inop.  There is no coffee in the lobby since Fatima is still on duty and was too busy to make some. This is where you discover that the motel cafe that opens at 0600 won't open until 0630 this morning because the cook, Jamil, was arrested last night and they couldn't get a replacement here on time. Your crew van leaves for the airport at 0630.  Now all you have to look forward to is the drive to the airport with Orangejello's twin brutha that has the early shift, he be Lemonjello.   The only difference between them is that Lemonjello wears Dallas Cowboy jersey and hat that is on backwards. Bling is the same. I must admit that I am partial to the large gold spinner bling that resembles the spinning rims on an Escalade from the hood that he sports with pride. Lemonjello is very interested in the cute well educated black flight attendant from NY and ignores everyone else after seeing her. He talks shit to her all the way to the airport. She never responds to him. At the airport the escalotor is inop. The entire crew starts bitching and preparing all their sissy luggage for the trip up the stairs. Since you are already carrying your bags and were going to use the stairs anyway you quickly outdistance the whinning group and hurry to your inevitable encounter with, yes that's right, the T-fucking, S-fucking, A-fuckers. After the strip search, standing on one foot like Daniel Larusso in the Karate Kid and a mandatory body cavity search you emerge from the other side and start putting your belt, watch, boots and other shit back on. It is at this point that you realize that all you want to really do is fly airplanes. That's all you ever wanted to do. You learned to fly because you like flying airplanes and you take pride in your profession which has become a huge steaming pile of stinking runny shit. You reflect back to that Tuesday morning at 0630 hours on December 8th, 1964 during your Sophomore year of high school when you rode your Cushman scooter to the airport and soloed in a J-3 Cub. You remember every detail, color and smell. At this point you also begin to ask yourself whether the brief time in the shiny, go-fast jet airplane is really worth all the grief that comes with it.

I retired (after twenty two years) eight years early in 2000 because the airline I worked for had evolved into a huge successful diversity experiment that I no longer wanted to identify with. It is still the best passenger airline today, but not the fun place it was in the seventies and eighties. Fortunately I escaped with enough money to live my life and do fun flying. No offense to female, gay or sex-changed pilots and flight attendants, but life was much easier when pilots were straight boys that could fly the hell out of an airplane with steam gauges and stewardesses were young attractive girls in hot pants and boots that could get out three rounds of drinks on a fifty minute flight. Those were the days, and they are gone forever.

Actually there are some rather interesting flying jobs out there if you look hard enough. If I were starting over I would take a hard look at DEA or Customs Service. Helicopters offer some satisfying challenges too.

Quoted:
I confess that I wanted to fly. I got a degree in Mechanical Engineering, went to the Navy flight school as a brown bar Marine and got to fly F-4s in Hawaii and later in the reserves. I enjoyed the hell out of it, but when it came time to pass the baton, I didn’t have any trouble doing that too.