Airline pilots are rare only because we don’t need that many of them, and the costs of entry as a hobby are very high.
how many professional golfers are there? only as many as can be supported by the audience. But there are millions of people who can play golf. Because it’s a competition, the professionals do tend to be the ‘best’, but there’s no reason to believe the next 100,000 golfers, if they did nothing but play golf, couldn’t be just as entertaining.
How many leading actors are there? Certianly you wouldn’t argue that actors are more special than Airline Pilots simply because there are fewer of them.
Question: Are airline pilots paid based on tests of superiority and merit, or are their wages set based on how many years of service they have?
Are airlines constantly looking to replace pilots with others who have done “particularly well” for other airlines, like baseball teams do with pitchers and other players? Or do airlines treat pilots as “assembly-line” workers who can be inserted here or there without much difference in quality?
There are fields where we seek out the absolute best, like surgeons. Airline Pilots are certainly trusted with our lives, so we expect them to be competent, but I’m not looking to make sure my pilot was valedictorian of his university in order to feel safe flying.
As I said before, all things considered I am more concerned about the ability of the bus driver, because he is more likely to encounter a situation in which the bus could crash.
If the plane ever breaks down, I’ll be glad if there is an extra-special pilot in the cockpit who is superior to his colleagues and can save us, like the guy who set his plane down on the Hudson.
But we all know both how lucky that guy was, and also how lucky those passengers were to have THAT GUY flying the plane. It’s not like they paid extra for their tickets to get the pilot “rated number one for the past 3 years”. He was just the guy the airline assigned to the plane that day.
So while I appreciate a pilot with experience, I have no doubt that, if I chose to do so, and had the money, I could train and become an excellent pilot. Follow the checklist, attention to detail, practice the fire drills — being able to evaluate situations quickly, and having coolness under pressure are the big things that are hard to “learn”, but many people in my field have that ability as well.