What is the salary of a Boeing 747 pilot?

Answer 1

Average Captain's salary with 10 years experience as a Captain ~$265000.

The above "answer" is very high. Although salaries vary from airline to airline, a more accurate ballpark figure would be around $200K. By the way, the term "salary" is not really the right term. Pilots are not paid a "salary." They are usually paid by the hour. Hours vary throughout the year and with upturns and downturns in the economy. If you fly less, you make less. Those that are on reserve (on call) generally make less than those who have a regular schedule. Information about pilot salaries can be very deceptive to those outside the industry. Pilot pay is normally a function of position (aircraft and seat....i.e., captain or first officer) and years of service. The years of service normally top out at 12 years, which means that someone in a certain position with 25 years of service would be paid the same as someone in that same position with 12 years. But that does not mean that everyone with that number of years is senior enough to HOLD that position. For example, the pay chart may show a pay rate for a 747 captain and 12 years of service, but no one can hold that position after 12 years. At my airline, the junior 747 captain has 25 years seniority. Another misconception is that everyone eventually gets to fly the highest paying aircraft. That is not true. Depending on how old someone was when he was hired, and how many pilots were hired in the previous years, a pilot may reach retirement age long before he ever gets to fly on the largest equipment. For example, if a pilot was hired at age 35 (not that unusual after getting the necessary experience flying in the military or flying commuters) then that puts him around age 60. Up until this last year, that was the mandatory retirement age. Even when someone does make it to the largest aircraft, he may only get to fly that for a short time before he has to retire. I've known of pilots that only flew a few trips on the 747 before having to retire. This whole area of pilot salaries is a lot like looking at professional ball player salaries. The guy hoping to make it to the major leagues looks at what the top guys are making, never realizing that very few make that much, or make that much for very long. If you factor in the years required to develop the experience and the low pay in the early years (my first job as a pilot at a major airline paid $800 per month) it puts the pay at the high end (for a short time) in a very different perspective.