Haul trucks (dumptrucks) may not, but a lot of other heavy machinery and manufacturing equipment does (or has joystick-like controllers)! Sticking with the mining trend, many shovels and drills use joysticks, knobs, and a crazy array of buttons. I’m having a hard time finding pictures, but you can see some of the controls in the videos on some manufacturers websites: P&H (drill, shovel, loader), CAT shovel, and here’s a really neat informational video that gives you a tour of the innards of a shovel.
Unfortunately, I don’t think operating heavy mining equipment is very comparable to driving in FRC, aside from some similarities in controls. Your mileage may vary, but it is usually slow, solitary, repetitive work without much excitement (exact opposite of the FRC environment). It is a high-stress environment, though the stress comes from pressure to increase production and knowing that mistakes can be costly and sometimes extremely dangerous. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in this topic (again, YMMV), but I had an internship in an open-pit copper mine one summer during college, and one of the perks was getting to spend an entire day hanging out in the machinery and talking to the operators, which I found incredibly insightful.
So if you liked driving in 2015 as much as or more than driving in other years, this job is worth some consideration.
I know this post reads as snarky, but I’m not joking. 2015 gameplay was more similar to operating heavy equipment than any other FRC game we’ve ever had. Staying focused, working quickly on a mundane repetitive task despite distractions, pressure to work faster vs pressure to not make costly mistakes.
I can’t believe no one has brought up military or civilian drone pilot. That seems like it would be very close to the same and have the added thrill of a third dimension.
Someone brought up UAVs very early in the thread. Generally your flight-stable aircraft, whether heavies or RPVs or whatever, are going to avoid the button-smasher mentality. Obviously if you’re landing on a combat airstrip or the Hudson river or practicing dogfighting or acrobatics that’s not true, but that’d be a long ways off and not the majority of your time.
If I had to pick one job in this vein, it’d definitely be rescue helicopter pilot, like in military medevacs or civilian paramedics. Certainly helicopters over anything fixed-wing / flight stable–the non-flight stable thing means you’re moving more to control it, and medevacs would have you flying all kinds of crazy routes under incredible stress and fulfillment.
Maybe, but not by much. Pilots don’t make a whole lot and some of the younger ones have to moonlight another job just to get by.
No. There are two reasons this isn’t so:
Most aircraft that I’ve seen still use manaul control for landing and takeoff.
If Autopilot fails or there is a problem, guess what? Pilots take manual control! The “autopilot fixes all” mentality has actually been the likely cause of fatal plane accidents, such as Adam Air Flight 574.
So while in practice most of the air time is automated, you still have to get in and out of the air, and if anything breaks, you need somebody to manually fly the plane.
The pay is TERRIBLE at first. My first year I made approximately $20,000, which is just about the same as what you would make full time at a fast food restaurant. That’s really bad considering it takes about $120,000 investment to get to your first flying job. You can expect that to go up to the mid $30k range after a few years, but you might get stuck there for a while before upgrading to captain and then eventually moving on to a major. The pay is great once you get to a major, but that may take many years.
The autopilot is not required equipment on many if not most planes. That means if it goes out of service, you’re flying the plane around manually that day (as I have had to do on a handful of occasions). Therefore, you have to keep your manual flying skills sharp. Some people on CD familiar with aviation might say “but no airline would fly a plane below RVSM all day - that’s too expensive”. It’s not more expensive than cancelling flights. I once flew a leg from Detroit to Houston at 20,000 ft due to inoperative equipment, and one flight down the east coast at 4000 ft thanks to inoperative equipment (that was fun). Also, as Larry mentioned, takeoffs and landings are all done by hand unless you’re testing the cat-III equipment or flying a 777.
I found airline flying to be remarkably unstressful. Taxiing on the other hand can be fairly stressful - I used to remember how relaxing it felt to finally get in the air. When the weather is down to the bare minimums it heightens things a bit on approach, but I wouldn’t call it stressful. When something goes wrong - that would be stressful. Also, training is very stressful.
I thought the flying part of the job was great fun. The rest of the job got to be a real drag unless you don’t mind being away from home all of the time or not being able to plan for anything.
I would picture a fighter pilot being the closest job to that of an FRC driver, but it also would come along with the military lifestyle and a bunch of other stuff. On the plus side, however, many (if not most/all) fighter pilots actually have STEM degrees because a majority of them are recruited from the Air Force Academy, which places heavy emphasis on STEM degree programs.
If that interests you the Air Force Academy is probably one of the best ways to go to get started, since you end up with a debt-free 4 year degree and the required commission as an officer straight out of college. You would then need to pass the physical to be pilot qualified (vision must be correctable to 20/20, but don’t get LASIK or something like that from a non-Air Force ophthalmologist or else you’re automatically disqualified) and excel in the Initial Flight Screening (Air Force Academy graduates likely have an advantage here since they have aviation experience). Then the spots in SUPT are assigned based on your academic, military, and athletic performance during commissioning.
To give an idea of your odds of getting into SUPT for flight school, in 2013 there were 1,035 graduating second lieutenants, of which 432 went to SUPT (source: https://fightersweep.com/262/how-to-become-a-us-air-force-pilot/). It seems like you’d have decent odds of at least getting into flight school, but whether or not you would be a fighter pilot is not guaranteed. In phase 3 of SUPT you select between 4 tracks, fighter/bomber, airlift/tanker, multi-engine turbo prop, and helicopters. I would imagine that anything except for airlift/tanker might have the same FRC excitement feel that you’re looking for, but the selection process is again based upon your academic, flight, and military performance in addition to the needs of the air force (so if the air force needs a bunch of tanker pilots you might end up there regardless).
The other thing to consider is that entering into flight school locks you into a 10 year active duty service commitment. This could be a pro or a con (10 years of a guaranteed job, or 10 years stuck in a job you may not love), but it’s something that would have to be factored into your decision.
Just as a thought… You’re forgetting about two other branches that use fighters, and three that use helicopters. That would be the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Army (which last if I’m not mistaken is helos and drones only as far as flying–I could be wrong). And the Navy and Marine Corps have somewhat more “intense” landings and takeoffs if they’re doing carrier flying.
However, I would be very, very surprised if something like the rest of your post wasn’t true for the other branches (just replace the school with either the Naval Academy or West Point).
This isn’t much of a CD post, but since we’re giving what may end up being practical career advice, I feel the need to correct some inaccuracies in this post:
The Academy is not the majority source of new Air Force fighter pilots. In fact it’s currently not even the plurality source, coming in several percentage points behind ROTC. (In FY14 and FY15, ROTC was 45% to USAFA’s 42% for active duty lieutenant and captain fighter pilots.) This ratio varies among higher ranks, but these officers started in a different era, and retention isn’t directly related to flying–higher ranks don’t fly as much as younger ones.
The STEM degree question is a bit fuzzier, since it’s not always clear what constitutes a STEM major. STEM is certainly popular, but AFA actually had significantly fewer STEM fighter pilots than ROTC in the year checked (45% to 68% for lieutenants and captains in FY14 as definitely STEM). There’s no regulated reason for this, though, so it’d change year to year. Overall AFA majors are about an even split STEM versus not.
Academy graduates do not inherently have any aviation experience at all. The Academy provides some great flight opportunities (mostly gliders) on a voluntary/competitive basis, as do other universities and external programs. I know ROTC guys that went into initial training with multiple civilian pilot licenses and years instructing and flying civilian missions.
Separately, of course the Army and CG have helicopter pilots (both with college degrees and without) and the Navy [Edit: meaning Navy and Marines, grouped because the commissioning sources dovetail] has a variety. Also don’t write off airlift so fast; special ops airlift have some crazy low-level flight jobs. And again, if you’re looking for a civilian career, helicopter medevacs are way up there.
Eventually major sporting events(NASCAR, NFL, etc.) will be filmed by drones, our schools football games and practices are recorded by a drone and I’ve talked to the student who flies it and we’ve compared it to driving a robot. The high school side is not as stressful but the joysticks, skills needed to do it, and ability to do specific tasks with practice are there plus, I would think that once major things start being recorded by drones there’s going to be a lot of pressure on the operator to get the right shot. There is also drone racing which is also just getting started but will definitely grow in the upcoming years.
I like to think that I’ve gotten pretty close to getting paid to play robots. For the last two years or so, I’ve been Lead Engineer on a project for a Container Moving Vehicle that actually fits on the back of a (very specific) Truck. It’s been fun, a lot of my FRC experience has crossed over and been invaluable. Driving it is like an FRC robot, although FRC robots are a lot more fun.
