I used to dream of becoming a pilot as a kid and kept onto it right through my teens. It ain't happening, but I do still have plenty of the knowledge I picked up.
To answer the question that makes up the thread title: yes and no.
If you're a pilot starting out on the civilian route, you make peanuts for quite some time. The training is expensive, and the regionals that hire you first keep you at minimum wage or barely above it. There's no glamour at all.
The six-figure salaries come when you start flying larger aircraft across greater distances, with trans-Atlantic flyers getting the best incomes. This obviously takes quite some time. The 40-50 year old vets flying heavies from London to New York in service of major carriers are doing pretty well.
There are a couple of ways to break into the field:
1. Civilian. This is the method I mentioned above, and it is the hard way. You're responsible for your own training and certification. All of that is expensive. You begin making peanuts and work your way up, gaining experience and getting certified to fly more substantial aircraft as you go along. It can take decades for someone on this path to get to the "good" salaries ($100k+), and even lower $60-80k pay packages are not going to come easy or cheap.
2. Military. This is what I was going to do. The idea is to take all of the expensive, time-consuming and soul crushing drudgery I mentioned above with regard to training and climbing the ladder and outsource much of it to the US Military. If you can become a military pilot, they'll train you and you'll gain the hours/experience you need over the course of that training and during your actual service.
There are downsides, of course: you could be deployed overseas for long stretches of time, which may or may not be exciting for you depending on your family situation. You'll have to commit to the military for some time (I believe 6 years was the minimum, but I'm not sure). You won't make much, but you'll be doing better than you would as a civilian with rock-bottom pay and no benefits, plus you won't be covering the cost of a lot of your own training.
Despite these realities, I would contend that there is no better path for a pilot to take today than the military route. You will have received high quality training on the taxpayer's dime and your service will leave you with the kind of valuable flight experience that commercial and corporate airlines love to have behind the controls of their large jets. After a decade flying military jets you'll be in a much better position to compete for a job that pays you well than you'd be if you'd spent that time on your own.
If you take the military route, piloting isn't so bad. It isn't romantic Pan-Am mid-20th century glamour, but it ain't bad. If I met a kid dead set on flying today, I'd tell him to keep his grades up and gun for a spot at the Air Force Academy (or the naval Academy secondarily) out of high school with an eye to becoming an officer and a pilot upon graduation. It is competitive, but a focused kid stands a pretty good chance at making it and there's simply no better way these days to get into a cockpit for a living. If you want helos, the Army warrant officer route isn't bad either.
As far as salaries go, check out this link:
http://www.dtek.us/salary/PP_2013_SS.pdf
That's a very recent and detailed survey given to pilots, primarily corporate ones (the dudes flying bigshots around in those private jets and helicopters). There are commercial airline salaries presented here too, though they're less accurate since most of the pilots who responded to the survey were in corporate. It can give you a good idea of what pilots are getting in corporate aviation. There's some significant variation by aircraft category, but if you can manage to Captain a G5 you're going to find yourself safely in the six-figure range.
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). LOL
