US Airways pilot Capt. Chris Beebe remembers biking as a 10-year-old boy from his Delaware County home to watch the planes at nearby Philadelphia International Airport.

Seven years later, his passion to fly didn't wane when a small plane carrying his aunt ran out of fuel and crashed near Clarion, Pa. Two months after that fatal accident, Beebe enrolled in flight school, at the age of 17. "There's nothing else I ever wanted to do," he said.

Now the Bucks County resident, who has been flying for US Airways for 20 years, is at the forefront of an effort to preserve the careers, and lifelong passions, of 4,800 other pilots - including about 1,100 who live in the Philadelphia region - as the airline grasps to hang on financially.

As chairman of the US Airways unit of the Air Line Pilots Association, Beebe played a key role in hashing out a tentative agreement that calls for pilots to give back 26.6 percent in yearly wages and benefits as the airline seeks to secure federal loan guarantees.

But the terms of the agreement have left many pilots angry. Beebe and other union leaders are meeting with them at "traveling road shows" to educate the rank-and-file about the deal before they vote to accept or reject it by Aug. 8.

Among the pilots caught in the quagmire is Rich Pfenninger of Doylestown, who heard from Beebe and others at a Philadelphia meeting last week. A second session is scheduled for today.

Pfenninger, 42, was hired by US Airways in 1990 - and furloughed a year later. For the next seven years, he tended bar, drove a truck, sold insurance, and did landscaping work, all before the airline took him back in 1998.

Now, still with too little seniority, he is afraid that the cutbacks in the tentative agreement might mean he will be out of a job again. Under the agreement, US Airways would have flexibility to reduce the number of its aircraft, which would trigger job losses.

"I do want this company to survive, but I'm going to be voting away my own job if I vote 'yes,' " he said. And without his pilot's income, he and his fiancée will have to postpone the wedding they've planned for January, Pfenninger added.

Under the tentative deal, pilots - who are US Airways' highest-paid labor group - would agree to $465 million in total salary and benefits reductions. That means a typical junior pilot would see a cut in salary from about $150,000 to $110,000. Many captains would see their annual incomes shrink from $210,000 to $155,000.

If the agreement were approved, the smaller paychecks would begin arriving Aug. 15. The agreement would be retroactive to July 1 and last through 2008.

"Homes will be sold. Kids will go to different colleges. There will be divorces," Beebe said, predicting the impact of the pay cuts.

US Airways says it needs the pilots' concessions - as well as others from flight attendants, mechanics and other employee groups - in order to restructure and become profitable. The airline, which lost $2 billion last year, had a cash balance of just $602 million, according to its latest financial report.

US Airways has won conditional approval of a $900 million federal loan guarantee, but a key condition is reaching final agreements with its unions. And even if the guarantee gets final approval, the airline has said a bankruptcy filing is still possible.

Meanwhile, Beebe and other longtime airline employees aren't pointing to the tentative deal between US Airways and the pilots - which the union said was the airline's final offer - as a definite remedy to help reduce costs.

In the last such agreement, struck in 1998, "We gave management every tool they asked for to build a successful airline," Beebe said. "But that [didn't] preclude us from being victimized by people who make bad management decisions."

In the Philadelphia session that Pfenninger attended, one union leader told the 100 or so pilots there that voting for or against the agreement was tantamount to embracing "the devil you do know versus the devil you don't know." His point was that it is uncertain how pilots would fare if a bankruptcy judge were to intervene.

Roy Freundlich, a spokesman for the pilots union, said: "It's a great job. You get into it because you love flying, but this is a horrible industry."

In spite of the financial struggles, though, many pilots say they can't see themselves switching careers.

Beebe, who also flew planes for Ransom Airlines and Western Airlines, survives by trying to "maintain perspective and understand the daily setbacks are part of the process of getting to the long-term goal."

And what is that goal?

His answer: "There is nothing more fun than taxiing onto a runway, pushing those throttles up... and taking off and going somewhere."