Salary
Average Salary: $87,000
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $3,632,076
Aviation safety inspectors make a pretty good wage, with an average salary of about $87,000 a year (source). They also have the chance to make about $30,000 more than that as they progress through their career. Just don't expect to go house shopping right out of high school.
While a college education isn't necessarily required, an incredible amount of work experience and training stands between you and that dream of wedging a clipboard into your armpit as you climb into the tail section of a Boeing 787.
If you want to inspect plane guts for mechanical failures, then you're generally going to start this career as a mechanic. That probably won't come as a surprise to you. If you want to govern pilot operations, you're going to start out as—you guessed it—a pilot. The average salaries for those two gigs are $77,000 (source) and $63,500, respectively (source).
The good news is that, unlike many jobs, you'll have a pretty good idea of the pay and specific benefits before jumping in. The only way to inspect commercial planes for a living is to work for the FAA, so everything is fairly streamlined and straightforward when it comes to compensation. That's good and bad. On the one hand, it saves you the trouble of shopping around. On the other, as job pay goes, it's pretty much take it or leave it.