$60k is probably not a good estimate. In the US, a pilot's wages are determined almost exclusively by seniority with the airline. And working at a regional mea

$60k is probably not a good estimate. In the US, a pilot's wages are determined almost exclusively by seniority with the airline. And working at a regional means you're at the very bottom of the bottom of the seniority scale. Starting pay at a regional have clocked in under $30k/year for quite a while. A lot of this is because crews aren't paid for all the hours they spend working -- they're usually only paid for the time from closing the door of the flight they're operating to opening it at the other end. On the junior end of the scale, pilots sometimes go days without sitting behind the controls of a plane because their duties consist of sitting on standby in an airport in case some other pilot can't make a flight. Throw in the inconsistent flight hours when they do fly, the fact that they usually come in with six figures of debt from flight school, and have limited mobility since switching airlines kicks them right back down to the bottom of the seniority ladder, and you're talking about effectively poverty-level living conditions for the first few years of a pilot's time with an airline. This is where the alleged "pilot shortage" in the US came from: airlines mistreated their junior ranks so badly, for so long, that they started running out of people willing to put up with it. There are some signs of adjustment at the regionals, but they run on such razor-thin margins that it's not clear they'll really be able to fix this.