Post flight school (8 years retrospective)

More than 8 years later, a brief welcome back!

Even though I had plans to continue blogging even after graduation, that didn't happen and I realised the blog ended fairly abruptly why I want to apologise. I will not restart the blog now either, but just briefly summarise the last 8½ years for anyone who might be interested.

Shortly after my previous blog post on September 12th 2014, I passed my line check on Boeing 737 for Norwegian. I then seamlessly continued flying as a fully certified ordinary first officer, and was initially based in Tenerife for the winter season 2014-2015. During this time I also had to finish my bachelor's thesis in order to formally graduate from university, which I did in January 2015. Of us 12 students in the class, 11 graduated while one unfortunately failed the line check and was unable to continue. Of those 11, 10 chose to be full time pilots at least until 2020. One was offered a job but declined and pursued a different career.

After being based in Tenerife the first winter, I applied for a base closer to home and was allocated Alicante, together with three other classmates and colleagues. While sharing an apartment and spending most of the days on Costa Blanca was really fun, around this time I started living together with my girlfriend in Sweden why the commuting became more and more of a hassle. Since the outlooks for a Swedish or even Scandinavian base at Norwegian seemed slim at this time, I applied for a job at Scandinavian Airlines/SAS and got an offer for a fixed employment in Stockholm, which was my first hand option. So after 19 months flying for Norwegian (of which 4 was training in Scandinavia, 5 based in Tenerife and 10 based in Alicante) I started in February 2015 working for SAS.

The next roughly 4 years were mostly great - while I didn't earn as much money at SAS as at Norwegian I had a fixed employment, fixed salary and fixed base which suited me well and I really felt at home in Stockholm (where I hadn't actually lived before 2015). Unfortunately as we all know 2020 was a terrible year not least for the airline industry - and together with almost all other pilots around my age that I knew, I was sacked by the end of the year.

With SAS having accelerated the outsourcing of pilot jobs to subsidaries and other operators already before the pandemic the outlooks for a quick return to SAS didn't look great and therefore I had to find myself another source of income. I chose to study software engineering during 1½ years, combined credits from other courses taken years back to get a bachelor's degree relatively quickly and got a job as a software developer at a small company in central Stockholm. I worked there full time during 2022.

As a result of the SAS pilot strike 2022 all of us that had been sacked during the pandemic were promised to get our jobs back and I got the offer already during the fall 2022. So on January 3rd 2023 I returned to SAS, albeit being employed by the subsidiary SAS Connect. At the time of writing I'm still doing training to get back into the first officer seat, and I'm really happy to soon be able to take off again!

If you're thinking about becoming a pilot yourself, my personal take would unsuprisingly be to always have a plan B. This plan should preferably be a solid one, that will be available even during the worst downturns in the economy. Be prepared that your dream and career might come to an abrupt end at any time - perhaps because you fail a test*, because there are no jobs, because you simply don't fit into any airline's hiring profile or because you incur a medical condition that is incompatible with pilot duty.

*Yes, you'll normally have at least two tries. Tests are numerous both during flight school, during training for a different aircraft type (which you might be forced to undertake by your employer) and for the rest of your career. That means at least once per year just in order to keep your licenses and ratings both when unemployed and during active employment.

Also be aware that the working conditions for pilots nowadays are probably worse than you think - and don't expect to be treated well. You might be employed through a staffing agency with little job security, have none or low guaranteed pay with a large variable part only being paid when you fly (which means much less pay when you're sick and during vacation). You might have a working schedule which is completely variable (up to 7 working days in a row, and sometimes as little as one full day off between working periods) with few to no opportunities for influence, including vacation periods. With that said, I don't regret my decision to pursue this career - neither do I consider voluntarily quitting. But then I was very lucky to have to pay almost nothing for flight school (since it's a government funded program) and then I immediately upon graduation got a full time job (and of course getting the first job is most difficult).

Thanks Norwegian for the initial climb of my career! My last day: