alt Hacker NewsA remember a very, very, very high % of flight technology (basically flight school) majors in university being in ROTC. Paying for fuel is additional to tuition and it was extremely expensive. A lot of middle and lower class who wanted to be commercial pilots joined the military to get it paid for. No idea how many became fighter jet pilot, I assume most of them got jobs doing something more boring like troop or materials transport.
I would go so far to say as commercial flight is dominated by very rich people who could afford to do the commercial ratings on their own, or middle/lower class people that became military pilots to pay for it.
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What? No way. Yes, a lot of airline pilots were former military, but I know several people who are airline pilots and did not come from "very rich" families.
Flying is not in any way some kind of high-status luxurious job. It can be grueling, with intensive and continuous training, wacky shifts, very strict rules, lots of time away from family, long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. You can lose your career over a minor mistake that snowballed into a incident due to factors out of your control. Minor health issue? Need mental help? Better get those fixed in secret or you probably won't fly again.
In my line of work, a major mistake would bring down an internal website at a big company for a little while. An airline pilot's major mistake would kill himself and a hundred-plus people.
I can't fathom why anyone who is rich would want to be an airline pilot. It's a shit-ton of work, stress, and risk for not much reward. You gotta love to fly in order to stick with it. If the rich want to fly, they just do the training and buy a plane, they don't need to do it for a living!
Very few rich people become commercial pilots. They might get a private pilot license as a hobby but generally pilots are just employees they hire to take them around.
Plenty of working airline pilots come from regular middle-class backgrounds and never served in the military. They take out student loans to pay for training, then work low-paying jobs as flight instructors or something to build up enough flight hours to get hired at a regional airline.
Those who go the ROTC route can totally get a fighter jet assignment if they want it. Once they get selected for a pilot slot, assignment to a particular airframe is primarily based on how they perform in the training pipeline.