Think airplane pilots make lots of money?  Think again:

Fast Company magazine actually included "airline pilot" on its list of "The 25 Top Jobs for 2005." "Airline jobs pay in the six figures," says the magazine. That one that had me spurting coffee over my keyboard.

Well, they do, some of them, but that's a bit like saying that acting jobs pay in the eight figures, just because a small minority of actors are lucky enough to become stars. Be cautious of sources citing "average" salaries. Those averages might pertain only to captains, or only to pilots employed by the major carriers. Along with these dollar values often comes the implication that they're obscene or undeserved, failing to explain that a given pilot is liable to be in his late 50s by the time he earns that fourth stripe and a respectable income, after a lifetime of slogging it out for nothing pay and possibly enduring years of furlough. A pilot's early and mid-career struggles, and the fact that many (or most) of them never make it to a major airline at all, aren't routinely quantified in the bullet-point salary rankings.