Earlier this week we took you through the steps required to be able to work as a pilot on a commercial passenger line. As we saw, it’s a pretty gruelling path to qualification, requiring thousands of hours in the cockpit and in the classroom, not to mention tens of thousands of pounds in tuition fees.

What we didn’t have space to tell you in that blog post, however, was that there are also loads of other great careers in the airline sector. So if you have always been amazed by air travel but for whatever reason don’t quite see yourself in a captain’s uniform, why not consider trying a career in one of these fields?

Air-traffic control

If you’re good at shouldering enormous, life-and-death levels of responsibility and have supreme levels of accuracy and concentration, then working in air-traffic control would be one of the best ways to make use of–and receive financial reward for–those talents.

Simply summarising the job of an air-traffic controller in a sentence makes the work seem simple: they make sure aeroplanes coming into and going out of an airport or on a flight path are where they should be at the right time. But since all they have to do this are some computer instruments and radio contact with pilots, and since the consequences of them getting things wrong are potentially a crash between two planes and many fatalities, it’s easy to see why this isn’t a job for the faint hearted.

And this is precisely why air-traffic controllers receive the very high salaries that they do. And it’s also why they undergo a rigorous programme of training that is very difficult to get into. Entry to the profession is through being accepted to the College of Air Traffic Control, who put their applicants through several different, highly demanding assessment stages that test all sorts of cognitive, behavioural and physical areas.

Flight Attendant

Working as a flight attendant is definitely a career choice worth considering if your strengths lie in your people skills. While most of the people in the customer-service world are stuck in shops or call centres, you’re travelling all around the world for free, being put up in hotels by your employer.

However, this certainly isn’t a job for those who want a means to the end of travelling. Not only do flight attendants get the heave-ho by their employer if they fail to uphold very high standards of customer service or fail to act in compliance with the procedures they’re told to follow, but they also have to be able to act calmly in a crisis and take safety procedures incredibly seriously.

Although there are different sorts of academies that offer training programmes for flight attendants, the majority of airlines operate their own training schemes, entry for which doesn’t require a qualification from these aforementioned academies. Experience working with customers would certainly increase your chances of being accepted to an airline’s flight-attendant intake, however.