Alternately, US airline companies don't give enough compensation to attract qualified pilots. Becoming a pilot is extremely expensive unless you flew in the mil

Alternately, US airline companies don't give enough compensation to attract qualified pilots. Becoming a pilot is extremely expensive unless you flew in the military. Once you do get your license, anyone that is hiring you is going to give you some little rinky dink plane to fly for years with odd schedules while paying you the same as if you worked at costco. In the mean time, there are numerous ways to get blacklisted or possibly lose your pilot's license unexpectedly like getting diagnosed bipolar. (Doesn't it make you feel safer that pilots will skip psychiatric help out of fear of losing their license from a diagnosis?) And then some time down the line when you finally log enough hours and flights to get a bigger plane, now you have far more passengers to worry about, higher scrutiny from the company, and a much larger and more complex plane to make everything more stressful to finally break into 6 figures. Without having a multi-millionaire family or a parent that is a pilot, the only reasonable way of even becoming a commercial pilot is to fly for the military. Otherwise you aren't going to get enough flight hours to make any real money until you are already approaching retirement age and having already built a whole other career to support the cost of flying or owning even a small cessna.