Major airline pilot shares incredible amount of money he makes per flight

An airline pilot has revealed how much he makes for the rather important job of wrestling a giant metal bee full of people through the skies without crashing it.

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.

While he spent just over seven hours on board a plane, his total 'time away from base' was a smidge over nine hours, so it had a tight turnaround time where he could be there and back in the course of a day.

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.