Frankly speaking, there are some professions in this world where you’d hope the person hired was being paid very handsomely for their time and effort.
A pilot is one of them, every day a lot of lives are depending on them doing their job correctly, so you’d hope the people hired for such a job were being paid well.
YouTubing airline pilot Garrett decided to put out a video explaining how much he was paid for doing a flight as well as what sort of jobs were most lucrative for him, and it might make you want to become a pilot.
The pilot broke down how much he was getting paid for a favourite flight of his. (@flywithgarrett / YouTube)
Garrett explained that he was paid $213.87 (£175.57) an hour for his efforts, which sounds great, but broke down what that actually meant for the amount of time each of these journeys actually took him.
Pilots cannot simply roll out of bed and into the cockpit of a plane, then rush from one flight to another for the return journey, there is going to be time between the flying which he defined as ‘time away from base’.
Breaking down the costs of a particular flight he liked doing, he deadheaded (where a pilot travels as a passenger to get them where they need to be) from LaGuardia Airport, New York, to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Texas, and then flew back. In total, his pay for that job was $1,556 (£1,227).
The pilot said he liked this route because he could work on other tasks while deadheading and he wasn’t stuck away for very long before being able to fly back.
For comparison, crunching the numbers on another flight from JFK Airport, New York, to Phoenix, Arizona, the pilot said he could have a 24 hour layover. This means that he might be in the skies for about 10 hours or so, but he could be spending closer to 40 hours ‘time away from base’, which made it ‘not the best bang for the buck’.
The pilot said that he could be making a lot more money if he upgraded to being a captain or taking certain routes at particular times. In another video he explained how he made $5,500 (£4,515) from a longer flight between Phoenix and JFK where he also got other factors like holiday pay.
“The first one is that we can kind of treat these sorts of YouTube videos as digital assets.
“They are investments. An investment is something that puts money in our pocket, and so the fact that I’ve put the time and the effort into making this video, and sticking it on YouTube, means that this video is generating money, it’s generating passive income, it is making me money even when I’m sleeping, which is kind of the definition of an investment.”
The YouTuber explained: “Now, when we think of investment, we often think of things like real estate or crypto and stuff.
“But like right now, my crypto has lost me a lot of money and real estate investments i’ve made in properties and stuff have generated way less than $191,258.”
Initially, it underperformed, ranking among his worst in the first few weeks. This experience taught him not to stress over factors beyond his control, a lesson he applied to both YouTube and life in general.
“It’s one of the highest performing videos on the channel and the lesson I’ve learned from this is to not worry about things that are outside of my control,” he said.
