The Uniform Looks Expensive

A few days ago, a reel passed by on my feed: a pilot, still in full uniform with the stripes on his sleeves, riding a rented Lime scooter home from the airport. The caption was simple: “You just landed a plane, then you go home in a Lime.”

The comment section was full of pilots from all over the world, laughing and crying at the same time. One comment got more than 1,073 likes. It said something like: happened everywhere man, I drove home on a $1,500 old scooter after flying a $150 million machine called an airplane.

I know the guy who wrote that comment.

He sleeps next to me. Well, whenever his roster allows.

Photo by Denis on Unsplash

The girl who had never been to an airport

Let me rewind a bit.

I went to the Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Science. My major had a name so long that even my mum couldn’t spell it, so let’s just say I studied fishing gear and fishing vessels. My life back then was nets, boats, and the sea. I picked up scuba diving as a hobby, joined the campus dive club, and spent my weekends underwater, which sounds damn cool until you remember I was there to stare at fishes too long.

Meanwhile, my relationship with aviation was nonexistent. If you asked me what an airport looked like from the inside, I honestly couldn’t tell you. I had never been on a plane.

But one thing my lectures kept repeating stuck in my head: Indonesia is an archipelago. Seventeen thousand islands. Logistics and transportation here will always be a big business. Ships, planes, all of it.

Made total sense to me. How else would people and stuff move across all that water?

Then my boyfriend, a senior from the dive club, another sea-weed like me, told me he wanted to become a pilot.

My reaction was “Hah?”

Not because it was a bad idea. Because I genuinely could not imagine that world. And a few years later, when we decided to marry, my brain did it again: hah, what kind of life am I getting into?

But hey. Archipelago country. Planes will always be needed. Of course. Bills wouldn’t be an issue.

Right?

The warning I didn’t understand

He finished flight school. We got married.

Then, early on, he said something that confused me: “Even though a pilot’s salary is above average, we can’t spend carelessly. Aviation is uncertain. This job is high risk.”

I didn’t really get why. In my head, pilots were the definition of financial security, someone who sounds like “let’s have breakfast in Bali, then lunch in Singapore.” But I agreed. I am not a lavish spender anyway, and aviation wasn’t new to his family. He had watched this industry his whole life. He knew better. So okay, aye captain, I’m on board.

For a while, life proved him wrong. The schedule was full, the flying was steady, and money was never a topic. I quietly wondered if my husband was just being dramatic.

He was not being dramatic.

Then the world stopped flying

Photo by Clément Proust on Unsplash

COVID happened.

Here is something most people don’t know: a pilot’s income is not one big fancy number. A big part of it is flight-hour pay. No flying, no flight hours. No flight hours, and what’s left is the base salary.

And during those months, my husband, a licensed pilot, the profession everyone thinks is fancy, was bringing home less than Jakarta’s minimum wage. Not because that was his salary. His airline, like airlines everywhere, was bleeding, and that was all it could afford to pay.

Let that sink in. Less than minimum wage. That was the moment his old warning stopped being an abstract sentence and became our monthly budget.

That was also the year I learned that “pilot’s wife” and “promo hunter” can be the same job title.

The recovery that never really recovered

When the world opened up again, his schedule filled up. We exhaled. Okay, we’re back.

Except… after a while, the schedule started to thin out again. A few flights less this month. A few less the next. I thought it was just us. It wasn’t. While the world now flies more than before the pandemic, Indonesia’s passenger numbers still haven’t returned to 2019 levels, and lately they’ve even been shrinking. Hundreds of aircraft in this country are grounded in hangars, waiting for spare parts and maintenance money.

That’s when the fact I learned in university finally cracked open.

Yes, we’re an archipelago. Yes, in theory, we should be one of the biggest aviation markets on earth. But here’s the part my lectures never mentioned: need is not the same as market. An archipelago doesn’t buy plane tickets. People with money do. When the economy squeezes, people take the bus, the ferry, or just stay home. Geography, it turns out, does not pay the fuel bill.

Fun fact that still bothers me: this nation of seventeen thousand islands makes up only around two percent of the world’s air passengers.

Two percent. From the country that supposedly needs planes the most.

It used to be fancy. It isn’t anymore.

There was a time when being a pilot in Indonesia meant a big-name European car in the garage. That image was real once. My husband’s family lived through that era, and that’s exactly how he knew, long before I did, that none of it was guaranteed.

That era is over. Budget airlines changed it. The pandemic changed it. The economy changed it. What’s left is a demanding, high-stakes job with irregular hours, a medical check that can end a career in one morning, and a paycheck that moves with fuel prices and whether ordinary people can afford tickets this month.

And sure, if you fly for a big airline in the US right now, your story looks different. Pilot salaries there just hit record highs. But that boom never crossed the ocean. For most of us in the low-cost world, the scooter comment is not a joke. It’s a ride to survive.

The uniform still looks the same. The life behind it doesn’t.

I’m writing this because the image in most people’s heads is about thirty years out of date, and nobody bothered to update it.

And if you’re dreaming of that uniform yourself: do the math before you do the medical check. The math only works if you love flying enough to accept the bad years with the good ones.

My husband does. That’s why he’s still here. Him and his old scooter, and 1,073 people who felt that.

If the me from back then, the fisheries student who had never seen an airport, could read this essay, I know exactly what she would say.

“Hah?”

Yeah. Me too, girl. Me too.

. . .

Originally published at https://medium.com on July 12, 2026.