I am warning you now. This is going to be a long one. I’ve got lots to say, so lets get started….

The last many days have been some of the best days I can remember. Not for any reason external to me. In fact, many elements of my life right now are in a state of decay. Certainly the chief element right now concerns my position as an airline pilot. I’ve posted multiple entries here on PA describing the details of this industry and I am not planning on spending undue time rehashing these things. So, lets summarize all of these posts by stating a simple line: unless professional aviation can someday provide this worthy professional a respectable quality of life, respectable pay, and respectable and reliable professional advancement, I will not be coming back. The last many days have been great because I am smiling again at the opportunity to excel on my own determination.

I have noticed a steady decline in my happiness level over the last year and it does stretch that far back. What I have endured, with paralleling hardship endured by my favorite person in the world, my wife, is not something that many couples could have endured as well as we have. Even the strongest I-beam can be bent with the proper force and our relationship is no different. The last 18 months have seen me home about 40% of the time on average, much of that time while my wife was working. As people longing to survive, we have adapted, and I am afraid that the results of this adaption have resulted in an increased independence on both parts and a resulting loss of an appreciation for what the other provides. I cannot speak on behalf of my wife, but I can say with relative certainty for every unit of hardship that I have endured during the loneliness of the cumulative multitude of months away from home and family, she has experienced a hardship of greater weight. This woman to whom I am married is a source of life for all of us at home. Our little dogs, our cats, our stray cat that sleeps on the door step (a.k.a Special Kitty), and the occasional Australian Shepherd foster dog all rely on her for their survival and she dutifully fulfills those needs. As they look to her for survival, I do in suit. I can prepare my own meals and can use the bathroom on my own, however, the reliance is still there in a different form – a mental form. And as the old adage says, one must continually create a relationship for it to endure. Nothing endures without continual creation. It is not impossible, but is difficult to continually create a relationship from 1,000 miles distance. Sure, I come home on occasion (and lately, considering the commuting as well, occasionally has been all it has been), but it is a struggle to fit a week of love into a day or two and to rinse and repeat that same ratio for month after month after endless month.

Examining the lifestyle, it could be conceived that if it paid appropriate dividends, then it could be endured. And so it goes that there are many professions that require one to travel frequently, work many many hours, etc. I am not afraid to work for something for working for. However, it is my opinion, and a very educated opinion I might add, that working a fruitful career as an airline pilot is becoming more and more a gamble – and I choose that word wisely because in gambling you become addicted to throwing away your assets (money, time, family, spouse, etc) in the hope that it will eventually pay off. In a seemingly endless sea of stripes all yelling, “mine, mine, mine” at the relatively few piloting jobs available, coupled with the fact that my airline and many others at the regional level are filled with “lifers” who have tried and tried and failed and failed to get out because they didn’t convey that elusive magical element that the “destination” companies were looking for during the interview. Even if one could blaze the path, it could be argued with great effectiveness that the goal still isn’t worth pursuing. In fact, like in my gambling analogy, it could well be that for a young guy like myself, still on the south side of having children and with my entire career ahead of me, that when this profession does finally pay off, I may just have put more precious assets into the slot than what the payout would be, resulting in a net loss. I am speaking of lost nights with my wife, lost forever in the past, unrecoverable, lost holidays with my family and missed birthday parties, all unrecoverable. And, sadly, when my kids are moving out of the house to college, what will I have missed in pursuit of this apparition?

It has been the decision of all decisions to muster up the courage to walk away from this dream. This is the strangest career I can imagine. From the outside, it has sex appeal, I do admit. I tell people I am an airline pilot and inevitably get a look that says, “cool”. Its a neat thing to say that one does it. To be responsible for hundreds of lives a day, to fly a multi million dollar technical marvel of the 21st century is addicting. To command thousands of pounds of thrust and grease in a 45,000 lb chuck of awesome is tough to let go of. To take off into the cloudy murk at 6:00am, only to climb out of it into the clear blue sky and see the sun rising to the east above the overcast is tough to let go of. In the evening, to look out the cockpit window and see the Milky Way stretched across the sky, satellites in orbit, and the occasional shooting star is hard to let go of. Shooting an instrument approach in the pouring rain, covered with ice, and breaking out 200 feet above the runway before completing a successful landing is tough to let go of. Flying over the spine of Florida at 37,000 feet and being witness to the entirety of the state in one sweep of the eye, west to east coast, the big lake and all is tough to let go of. So in these regards, I honestly do get why the line outside the door is so long. And like all of those folks, it was (and could be argued “is”) my dream to do and experience these things. For some reason, I was planted with the aviation bug. I cannot put words onto why I am addicted to it like I am. Only those who are infected can truly appreciate the feeling.

On the other hand, I am a fairly smart guy. Despite all of these things, they ABSOLUTELY pale in comparison to feeling the love of the one who truly loves me, the feelings that I can only imagine that I will feel when I hold my first born (and second too) in my arms and look into the eyes of my post labor wife with the humility that must have been felt by thousands of fathers after witnessing one of the most amazing miracles in this world. Watching my child succeed at something and knowing I will be there to witness it first hand, to see him/her blow out the candles on their birthday cake – ON THEIR BIRTHDAY… These are things that I cannot and WILL NOT not give up. When I am on my deathbed reflecting back on a life lived, I will not be lying there in a dying body wishing I could have the multi thousands of nights back to spend in my own bed next to my wife that I otherwise spent in endless hotels around the country.

Faced with this direct conflict of interest between this profession and the other more worthy things in life, I just cannot turn a blind eye to what I feel is the right thing to do. And it has taken me a good while to convince myself that it is the right thing to do.

However, I mentioned I was a smart guy. This is debatable, I guess. I’ve been thinking and I do see some very real possibilities in my future where I can potentially blend these two interests into something worth pursuing. Visions of sitting in the captain seat of an airliner buried in 1040s while the F/O flies the leg come to mind. However, I just don’t see this as a viable option, and it still finds me enduring all the same pressures that I just pointed out. My thoughts are more along the lines of opening my own accounting business in the not too distant future and focusing a segment of my business on aviation matters. I can see myself being one of the premier tax adviser/preparers among working airline pilots in the area. I believe that pilots would trust a CPA (will be one soon), who is also an active flight instructor, airplane owner, and who has worked and has an appreciation for matters regarding the aviation industry. Furthermore, I could get into advising up and coming companies who are looking into creating a flight department. Perhaps they could be looking to acquire a King Air or similar; I could go in and sift through their records, and advise on how to go about it, how to structure the purchase or lease in the most cost effective way. I realize most companies have internal accountants for this, but perhaps a specialization in the area would be appreciated. Perhaps I could even get partially involved in the actual sale of the airplane, perhaps in an agent’s role – just thinking out loud here. And of course, just for the raw revenue, I wouldn’t restrict myself to this side of the business – I am open to everyone’s business.

Being my own person, knowing how to do my job, doing it well, building client relationships, and being in direct control of my success or failure – unlike anything that is possible in the airline industry – would be a worthy goal in my estimation.

I am well aware of the sizable ravine that exists between my present location and where I’d like to be at the peak of my career. WORK is what lies between here and there. The key to success is to take it one step at a time. Its akin to climbing the side of a mountain. Should you look up, you might get dizzy and fall off. And standing on the bottom looking up, there is no way to know exactly where all the footholds are. But, one must take the first step, and upon succeeding at that, look around for another foothold and take that step. In time, one reaches the top.

The first step for me is to wrap up my involvement with this airline. I have decided that the best time to resign will be Dec 20th, give or take a couple of days. My schedule for November, as grueling as it is, will allow me to pass the 1,000 hours in type that I am looking to achieve before I exit. Once that goal is reached, any further involvement with the airline (i.e. in the first half of December) is strictly to receive a paycheck one last time.

The second step is to get started on the CPA requirements. My plan is to take 5 classes in the spring, FULL TIME!! The cost to this is that I will be unemployed for a little while. At first glance, some may say, “WHAT!!??”. However, it is as much a blessing as it is a slight risk. View it in this light: If I were employed at an accounting firm, say I had been since day one, there is no way that I would be allowed to hang my hat for 5 months to go to school full time. I would have had to go in the evenings, significantly slowing my progress, while balancing the issues at work with my studies, etc. Perhaps I could have arranged a leave of absence, but I am pretty sure it would have been akin to pulling teeth to ask for that. Furthermore, if this airline job would have taken off (no pun intended), again, there is no way I could have taken this amount of time off to pursue a material portion of these requirements. However, with the industry collapsing around me, and the timing of it all, and reaping the benefits from our sound financial management so far, I believe the planets have aligned here and are telling me that now is THE time to do this, if there ever will be a time. With savings and my wife’s diligent work, and zero credit card debt going in, we can coast long enough to achieve one semester in the bag. Mid May will see me complete the first semester, cutting the 9 classes I have to take as of this moment, down to 4 remaining classes. I do not think that we will be able to coast any longer than one semester and as such, I am anticipating the need to get employed again come summer. But that employment will be in line with the primary objective that I have the necessary time available to finish the remaining 4 classes by year end. Early 2010 will see me in intense prep for the CPA exam and it is my goal to finish it by summer 2010. I will be 28 years old and my wife will be 27, the perfect age to begin a family. I anticipate that around the time the first child begins school, the second about 2 or 3, I will begin building my business up to speed.

Assuming something along these lines – which I have COMPLETE control over, unlike a gamble on the airline industry – I see myself running my own profitable business by the time I am 32-34 years old. Thats still a young a guy with a hell of a future ahead.

But, the task at hand right now is clear. The end result will be amazing. The filler is WORK and STUDY!

Having my CPA, running a fruitful business as my own pursuit, flight instructing on the side, being an airplane owner, and having a family life seems to be a life worth much more than living under the constant pressure of hoping for a break in the airline industry.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Airline Life, Career Advancement, Day to Day Stuff, General Aviation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.