Career outlook Starting @30

[Nicholas96]

Hello,

What is the career outlook of a freshly graduated aviation student from a Canadian college considering the age is 30 years old. At what age can the student roughly expect to land an interview at AC mainline.Furthermore, how many years from the point of graduation would it take to become WB/NB captain for a major airline such AC (mainline), Emirates or Qatar airways. I would not be discussing this scenario for an 18 year old as there are plenty of opportunities and time for career advancement at that age versus someone who is starting at an older age. Also please keep in mind that I understand many factors come into force such as movement in the industry,pandemics,ability to obtain and pass interview, line check and much more. So please don’t try to get very technical. I also understand that nobody can predict the future, so I am looking for the average estimated time frame required to achieve the goals mentioned above. Is there enough time to achieve a top salary, seniority and a comfortable life in the aviation game or is it better to look into a different industry altogether. Let me know what you guys think. Thank you.

[danield]

Pre COVID-19...

First job flying a small turboprop (PC12, C208, King Air etc..) as an FO. Expect to earn 25-30k a year. After a year or two if you are lucky a promotion to captain building PIC time earning 45-60k a year. Expect another year or two in this position.
1500 hours later you may have the opportunity to move to the regionals (Jazz, Porter, Encore, Skyregional etc..) expect 1-3 years as an FO earning 50-70k a year. If you are lucky again you may be promoted to captain at 90-110k a year.

Essentially 3-6 years of the above before you can expect to land an interview at AC. Earlier if AC is not your end goal (i.e. Sunwing or Transat..)

At AC you can expect 4 years of "flat pay" earning 70k-90k, upgrades to captain CAN happen within those 4 years depending on movement. NB Captains earn 200-230k a year. If no upgrade within those 4 years all positions pay well. A320 FO 140k to 777 FO 210k.

Start to finish if you are 30 and newly graduated you can realistically be at AC by age 34-36.. 3 to 4 years later making over 200k before you are 40. That being said I sat next to a 24 year old new hire on a deadhead who was at Jazz straight out of college and 2 years later at AC.. rare but it could happen.

Now this is based on my experience pre COVID-19. Not sure what the industry will look like once the dust settles..

Wish you the best of luck on your career.
Cheers.

[rudder]

Add 2-5 years to all of the above as a post-COVID timeline.

[RippleRock]

It doesn't hurt to be optimistic. Things will be back to normal eventually....certainly by the time this fellow is ready to enter the Commercial market.

We just passed a million deaths Worldwide. That means ---one person--- out of every 7300 alive on the planet has died due to this illness. (stats show they were already likely old, and in a compromised health state.....that's similar to a single death due to Covid-19 in a town of seven thousand)

One thousand have died in Canada due to Covid. Heart disease will claim 65,000 this year alone in Canada. Cancer will claim 79,000 this year in Canada. Diabetes, 20,000 in Canada. Five thousand committed suicide last year.........maybe more this year because of the collapse of their finances and increased stress. (Stats Canada 2018 numbers)

I don't see us shutting down the entire world economy to solve a single one of those health catastrophies.

Once people put this into perspective, things will return to normal relatively quickly.

[ant_321]

Another point is an interview at a major is far from a guarantee. There are plenty of jet captains flying Boeing’s and air buses who have never been able to get an interview at big red.

[fishface]

It doesn't hurt to be optimistic. Things will be back to normal eventually....certainly by the time this fellow is ready to enter the Commercial market.

We just passed a million deaths Worldwide. That means ---one person--- out of every 7300 alive on the planet has died due to this illness. (stats show they were already likely old, and in a compromised health state.....that's similar to a single death due to Covid-19 in a town of seven thousand)

One thousand have died in Canada due to Covid. Heart disease will claim 65,000 this year alone in Canada. Cancer will claim 79,000 this year in Canada. Diabetes, 20,000 in Canada. Five thousand committed suicide last year.........maybe more this year because of the collapse of their finances and increased stress. (Stats Canada 2018 numbers)

I don't see us shutting down the entire world economy to solve a single one of those health catastrophies.

Once people put this into perspective, things will return to normal relatively quickly.

134 thousand deaths from covid, not a million.

But I agree with everything else you said.

[780Pilot]

It doesn't hurt to be optimistic. Things will be back to normal eventually....certainly by the time this fellow is ready to enter the Commercial market.

We just passed a million deaths Worldwide. That means ---one person--- out of every 7300 alive on the planet has died due to this illness. (stats show they were already likely old, and in a compromised health state.....that's similar to a single death due to Covid-19 in a town of seven thousand)

One thousand have died in Canada due to Covid. Heart disease will claim 65,000 this year alone in Canada. Cancer will claim 79,000 this year in Canada. Diabetes, 20,000 in Canada. Five thousand committed suicide last year.........maybe more this year because of the collapse of their finances and increased stress. (Stats Canada 2018 numbers)

I don't see us shutting down the entire world economy to solve a single one of those health catastrophies.

Once people put this into perspective, things will return to normal relatively quickly.

134 thousand deaths from covid, not a million.

But I agree with everything else you said.

This is refreshing to not see a doomsday post and one in reality. Things will get back to normal.

[RippleRock]

I'm not saying this isn't serious, as a flood of Covid-19 cases --could-- put strain on the medical system.

HOWEVER, the Media is not putting any perspective on the Covid-19 mortality rate. They are spinning fear. Fear sells advertizing, and suits the Governments agenda.

Looking at the larger picture, they are calling Covid-19 "the killer" of 1000 Canadians, but it is rarely the exclusive cause. Underlying medical conditions are exacerbated by the virus. For the most part, these people were already SICK. If they reported the mortality cause correctly, it would appear less ominous. That isn't the Medias, nor the Governments objective.

This "police state" is getting insane. We're no longer allowed to chat at a safe distance with our neighbour over a beer. There's an "atta boy Doug".

[NotDirty!]

It took me 6 years from having my CPL signed off to get my first interview at AC... and I didn’t get hired that time, it was almost 6 years later that I actually got the job, 19.5 years after my first flying lesson. I was in my late 30s starting at AC, and while many in my class were significantly younger, 30% were older than me, mostly in their 40s, but one or two fifty-somethings.

I don’t think there’s any problem starting at 30; too bad the timing is a little rough! But you’re still young! Enjoy your career, make the journey as valuable as the destination. There likely won’t be the fast tracks to the majors that we have seen in the past few years, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There is little substitute for real world experience, and as long as you can make a liveable wage doing it, flying small aeroplanes is a great place to get that experience.

Good luck!

[altiplano]

We just passed a million deaths Worldwide.

Worldwide confirmed covid deaths as of this morning is being reported around 137,000.

https://www.google.com/search?q=covid+d ... 7360839844

Then again if we got real numbers out of China, we might be well past a million! But not officially yet.

[FL320]

Then again if we got real numbers out of China, we might be well past a million! But not officially yet.

The conspiracy theory.

[altiplano]

Then again if we got real numbers out of China, we might be well past a million! But not officially yet.

The conspiracy theory.

I don't think it's a conspiracy. It's well reported on by mainstream media, and it clearly goes deep with regard to unreported cases and deaths.

https://www.google.com/search?q=china+c ... e&ie=UTF-8

[goldeneagle]

One thousand have died in Canada due to Covid. Heart disease will claim 65,000 this year alone in Canada. Cancer will claim 79,000 this year in Canada. Diabetes, 20,000 in Canada. Five thousand committed suicide last year.........maybe more this year because of the collapse of their

Your numbers are a bit misleading, comparing a year of data on those, to a month on covid. You wont catch Diabetes or Cancer by walking close to somebody in the grocery store, they are not contagious diseases. Covid-19 is highly contagious, you can catch it by simply walking close to somebody that has it.

To date, there have been a thousand deaths from Covid-19 in Canada. The first one happened on March 09. On April 09 the count was 509. On April 15 the count was over a thousand. That's how an exponential growth curve looks, the last week had as many or more deaths as all the weeks before it combined. If the rate of spread is not contained, we will be over two thousand in another week, and over 5000 in two more weeks. On that trajectory by the time a year has passed the death rate from covid will exceed all of the above mentioned combined by a very large margin.

I have family in Europe in an area hit pretty hard by this pandemic. Cousin is a nurse in an ICU. She will tell you that early on during the spread they saw mostly elderly folks coming to intensive care, and 8 out of 10 that arrived in her ward, departed via the morgue. Today the age spread in her ward is more representative of the population in general, no shortage of younger folks. The 8 out of 10 number still holds, and she can tell you about helping to wheel a 21 year old professional soccer player downstairs to the cold room, a prime example of young, fit and healthy. I had an aunt in that area on the other side of the family, late 70's retired off the dairy farm and was in an assisted living place. Two weeks ago she came down with a fever, cough and had all the symptoms of Covid-19. She effectively suffocated in her bed in her home because there was no room for her at the hospital. She is not listed as a covid-19 death because she was never tested.

I live on Vancouver Island, my wife is a hospital site director, she has spent most of the last 6 weeks doing preparation and planning for the large influx of patients they prepared for. At this location they have not yet overflowed, and are hoping it stays that way, but as she often puts it, 'Hope is NOT a plan', so they continue to execute on the plan for worst case. OTOH, if they had not done things like cancel all elective surgery and work on discharging all those that could be discharged, they would now be in an absolute panic with stretchers in hallways everywhere based on the number of patients currently in the building. Bottom line, the plan so far has been working.

So as I see it, the health professionals ended up in a damned if you do, damned if you dont situation with regards to the measures taken to try slow the spread of Covid-19. If they were successful, a large portion of the population would be grumbling about lost freedoms and governments that went way to far making a big deal of nothing causing endless financial catastrophe. Then again, had they done nothing and the virus spread thru the country unhindered, same group of folks would be screaming loudly that 'government should have done something ' as hospitals everywhere were overflowing and new patients essentially being told 'we dont have a bed for you, please go home ', which is the case in some parts of Europe, and a couple areas in the USA.

I know there is a fair amount of grumbling happening here along the line of 'our government has killed aviation', but that's actually not the case. If there were no restrictions at all in Canada, and you had a 787 fully fueled and loaded with pax on the ramp in either Toronto or Calgary, where would you go with it ? Borders are closed to passengers all over the world these days. On Feb 1, aviation was dead already, just didn't know it yet.

Where are we going to end up on the other side of this one ? I dunno, folks often tell me that 2 years post 9/11 all was back to normal again. I guess they never flew anywhere before 9/11 so didn't realize those long endless security lines are an artifact of 9/11 that remain with us today. For GA, it brought us the endless hassle of APIS. Reality is, there is a long list of 9/11 artifacts still with us, but folks now take that as normal, it is indeed the new normal. Post covid we will find a new normal, but one thing I can say with absolute certainty, it will be a new normal, not the one we experienced even 3 months ago.

I've been in / around aviation now since '76. One thing I know, the 'big downturn' comes once a decade in this business. It may be a recession, it may be an airline bankruptcy, it may be any one of a number of things, but in the end it's always the same story, once a decade the bottom falls out of the market for seats on airplanes, and a whole swack of folks end up out of work in this biz. I've seen it, been victim of it, and always had to just carry on.

[L39Guy]

Excellent post.

[RippleRock]

They are reporting that medical facilities are not seeing the influx of cases that they had planned for. A clinic in my area that had seven doctors on hand was a ghost town on Wednesday.

My point was that we are paying an "enormous economic price" to keep mainly those with underlying medical conditions alive for a few years longer. We will be paying this toll well into the future. Some may never recover.

Have your medical connections considered the secondary toll of economic ruin and isolation on citizens health? Stress related ailments, increased domestic abuse, rising suicide rates, increased obesity from a sedentary "lock-down" lifestyle, increased alcoholism...….. You could probably write a book. My bet is that secondary effects of a lock-down society will exceed those of the virus itself in the coming decades......that's aside from the economic ruin that will ensue.

[Sharklasers]

What we are witnessing is what happens when you give health care professionals a blank cheque to do whatever it take to save every life costs be damned. Our near total economic destruction is a result of the myopic focus on covid outcomes. In a society costs must be weighed, does prolonging the life of a 90 year old to the fall outweigh the devastation done to this generation?
When this bill comes due we will be paying it for decades.

[HavaJava]

What we are witnessing is what happens when you give health care professionals a blank cheque to do whatever it take to save every life costs be damned. Our near total economic destruction is a result of the myopic focus on covid outcomes. In a society costs must be weighed, does prolonging the life of a 90 year old to the fall outweigh the devastation done to this generation?
When this bill comes due we will be paying it for decades.

100% agree.

I also believe that our politicians and healthcare professionals are far too risk-adverse with short-term outcomes due to liability concerns. If their decisions/actions can be linked to even one extra Covid death then they fear lawsuits/reprisals. This same mentality is why municipalities are closing every public space whether it makes sense or not.

There is no accountability for the medium to long term health outcomes that are being made 100 times worse by their decisions. The government will do everything it can to deflect responsibility, divert attention, and cover-up negative outcomes.

Ok, finally a question...[tinfoilhat] Which professions have the most to gain by perpetuating the fear-mongering and presenting themselves as martyrs? [/tinfoilhat]

[98 Corolla]

The most to gain is the media. Until we can somehow stop boomers from believing everything they see on CNN or Facebook we're going to keep having the same problem.

[HavaJava]

The most to gain is the media. Until we can somehow stop boomers from believing everything they see on CNN or Facebook we're going to keep having the same problem.

Hmmm...I’ve already seen propaganda from “first responder” unions that they need immediate and permanent wage and working condition improvements.

[altiplano]

What we are witnessing is what happens when you give health care professionals a blank cheque to do whatever it take to save every life costs be damned. Our near total economic destruction is a result of the myopic focus on covid outcomes. In a society costs must be weighed, does prolonging the life of a 90 year old to the fall outweigh the devastation done to this generation?
When this bill comes due we will be paying it for decades.

100% agree.

I also believe that our politicians and healthcare professionals are far too risk-adverse with short-term outcomes due to liability concerns. If their decisions/actions can be linked to even one extra Covid death then they fear lawsuits/reprisals. This same mentality is why municipalities are closing every public space whether it makes sense or not.

There is no accountability for the medium to long term health outcomes that are being made 100 times worse by their decisions. The government will do everything it can to deflect responsibility, divert attention, and cover-up negative outcomes.

Ok, finally a question...[tinfoilhat] Which professions have the most to gain by perpetuating the fear-mongering and presenting themselves as martyrs? [/tinfoilhat]

Good points.

China and Russia have the most to gain by destabilizing societies and depressing the Western economy. It would have been a disaster for China has this virus NOT spread to the West.

But professions that have the most to gain? Blank cheques for some organisations as was mentioned. The various levels of Government make power gains. Law enforcement, police/bylaw are overreaching their powers.