Most Exciting Jobs

Commercial flying is pretty safe. In general, it is less risky to fly than drive a car. Why do pilots make the list? For one, pilots spend substantially more time in flight than the average person does in a car, and because cars can not carry hundreds of people at a time and most people do not have the training or the ridiculous amount of money it costs to own their own plane, the number of pilots is far, far fewer than the numbers of drivers. This means that if something happens to a single pilot, the ratio of danger per pilot is far more greatly affected than if a single driver gets sideswiped by a milk truck. Another factor is the stark fact that running out of gas or having a mechanical failure is far more serious at 45,000 feet in the air than in the drive-thru lane of your local fast food. But probably the largest factor in this is that piloting is a unique job that includes many people who fly things that are not big, well-staffed commercial airliners. People who fly planes like crop dusters, or those with dangerous careers who fly small planes close to the ground and have a much higher risk of having an unfortunate accident than Captain Smith of Luxury Air.

For many people, fishing is a fun, relaxing hobby consisting of lazy mornings at the lake wearing funny hats and using a tackle box. But commercial fishing is an entirely different sort of activity. At the mercy of the wind, waves and temperatures that can vary from sweltering to well below freezing, fishers sometimes pull long shifts in excess of twenty hours while battling the elements. Falling overboard during severe weather is also a dangerous prospect because not only does the crew have to battle the waves and winds but the overboard fisher has a limited time to avoid freezing while managing to stay afloat. Despite improvements in equipment and weather tracking systems, the effort to keep crab legs on the buffet menu continues to expose fishers to the dangers of the deep.

When the power goes out, as it sometimes does, someone is there to see it comes back on. In many cases it is an electrical power-line worker, climbing a wooden utility pole or working in tight recesses underground to identify and repair the cause of the power outage. And while it does suck to miss the latest episode of Project Dance Idol Racers, the power-line workers are often in precarious positions to ensure that your lights come back on. One of the most common causes of power outages is severe weather, weather it is lightning strikes that overload a transformer, high winds that knock down power lines or heavy rains that seep through to underground power conduits. The power-line worker has to work in those same conditions that caused the outages. Sometimes tethered to a a splintery utility pole while winds howl around her. And if the power is out where you are, chances are the power is out where he/she is fixing it, so all his/her work is done in the dark, except for the light she can bring on her own.

Talk about working with a net. Roofers work on pitched, uneven surfaces high above the ground, often without anything to catch them if they should fall. And since one of their jobs is the repair of roofs, they are also at risk from the very damage they are there to fix. Rotten wood, loose tiles and structural collapse have all contributed to the danger of keeping the inside in. And once more, there is the weather to contend with. Sure, it is nice to be outside and get a breath of fresh air but when that fresh air turns into a violent wind and you are fifty feet above the ground on an angled, slippery surface, the niceness quickly fades. And when a gentle rain can turn the surface you are standing on into a playground slide that does not end in a soft landing, the risks of roofing are readily apparent.

While the call of the open road and the solitude of the truck driver is something celebrated in country music, peace of mind and an endless stretch of scenery is not the only thing that comes with this interesting job that you can get without a degree. Despite many countries having strict laws requiring truckers to rest on their routes, pressure to make deliveries on time sometimes leads drivers to take the road without enough sleep. Studies have shown that sleep deprivation leads to serious impairment in tasks like driving. That same pressure to deliver also sometimes leads truckers to ignore speed limits, and when you are barreling down a highway in a gigantic machine weighing multiple tons, physics tells us that it requires a lot of energy for that machine to stop. Given that those trucks also are at risk for mechanical failures, and that they must contend with other drives on the road who do not understand what physics says about inertia, it is not surprising that road accidents are the main contributor to the danger of heading back on the road again for a truck driver.

Although being able to tell people that your office is a forest and you write reports in chainsaw is pretty cool, it is no surprise that chopping down trees and splitting them into lumber is not exactly risk-free. While falling trees, malfunctioning equipment and dangerous tools are obvious perils of the profession, loggers also face risk from environmental hazards such as snakes, insects and the weather. It is hard, heavy work that takes place outdoors and loggers face danger from lightning, to heatstroke in the summer, to sudden dangerous winds. Once you have got that tree trunk down and safely secured, it does not mean the danger is over. This is definitely one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Irregularities in the wood can cause dangerously large splinters to fly through the air. When thunder, rattlesnakes and exploding trees are all in a day's work, it is a wonder that there are not more Heavy Metal songs celebrating the prowess of the logger's job.