Feel free to be economic with the truth by using aliases for organizations and products wherever it protects your privacy or your contracts. I’m mainly interested to hear about your unique experience.
Example follow-up questions: What was most rewarding, what was not? What was not a great use of your time but maybe still a learning experience? What were you interested when you were younger (for hobbies or otherwise) that may have helped guide you?
Boy do I hear that.
I’ve always heard that the local/regional airlines are absolutely miserable in the pressure they put on pilots, but also the only good way to get a career started. Do you have a sense that the big airlines are looking to have any kind of rookie hire / training program, or are they content to use the regionals as a filter / feeder unit?
That’s common in other countries, but I’ve never heard of any impetus to do it in the US. A lot of airlines have some sort of cadet program, but none that actually put any serious money into developing new pilots. For what it’s worth, the hurdles in becoming a pilot are a big part of why being a pilot in the US is so much better than the rest of the world, there’s a lot of benefit in being your own professional and not having the company own you in a training contract.