Standards & Hot heads

Not too sure what “aircraft tech” is, but if someone said that to me I’d be thinking anything from refuller, person who drives the tug, aircraft cleaner, to person who plugs a computer into the cockpit to figure out what Error Code 6215 means and why the 747 won’t start. They are all the jobs which the public don’t know about and don’t really care about since they only really see the cabin crew. Only they really have a status symbol job.

Some people might not “like” us drivers too much, but thats probably because we “get in their way” since apparently they own the road and have a much more important place to be such as the gym whereas that stinking lorry is only going to Sainsburys or the local sofa factory for example. These people don’t make the connection between what the stinking lorry does and their daily lives. You learn to ignore it pretty quick.

As for this is only a problem in the UK, erm, you might find in a lot of countries people think the same thing. For example in the US, drivers are often seen as low-lifes who never wash, have out of control beards and basically look like a cross between ZZ-Top and a hobo. They’ve got the huge advantage of wider roads, but even poorer car driving standards.

Why are we not seen the same as pilots or train drivers? On pilots, I believe to be a commercial pilot it costs at least £100,000 to train just to be in the cockpit, then there’s more constant training & testing, plus if you want to change aircraft even within the same brand you’ve got to do more training. Imagine having to do a new HGV test for a Scania, an Iveco, A DAF etc.

Train drivers got in there early with the status symbol probably because most jobs were hard manual graft and that was a very select job. Again it costs a lot to train someone to drive a train, plus there’s more training on each line and intermittent tests from what I understand. They were also all working for the same company for many years while the unions were powerful and until people got cars en-mass, they could pretty much hold the monopoly for long distance transport.

HGV drivers on the other hand, well, they didn’t even originally need to pass a test as long as they had a car licence! Even when you do, it’s all self funded so it can attract anyone and sometimes it attracts people who are complete a-holes. Of course any job can have them and often does, but generally they aren’t as widely seen as HGV drivers. Even “white van man” is slightly less obvious.

You do this job because you want to get a decent wage (yeah could be argued, but still £10 - 15 / hour fulltime isn’t bad) and you can put up with the crap. There are nice bosses like Albion and horrible ones, but same in any industry, although few are as nice to their workforce and have a cult following like Albion admittedly. :smiley: