Originally Posted by Vito
...but here's the problem. You guys have been singing the same tune concerning how somehow through good management/better productivity/fill in the blank.....JB has become sucessful, when in reality, your paid sub-scale salaries, cherry pick your routes (Haven't seen too many blue tails in Des Moines or Springfield MO, or Paris France) and your entire airline is on their 4th or 5th year pay scale....How can a Delta or AA compete?
Interesting, then, that upstart airlines that pay lower salaries and cherry pick routes have failed over and over and over in the past. The legacy airlines have always been able to wring them dry and one by one they join the ash heap. Yet somehow, even though there's 'absolutely nothing new' about the way JetBlue has approached it, they're a success? Riiiight.
And since Southwest was mentioned, how do they fit in, now that they're pretty much leading the industry in just about every way? What does that say to the people who were squawking this same stuff about them 15 years ago?
Look, even setting aside the presumptiousness of "speaking for the majority of non-JB pilots" and telling an entire group of pilots not only that we don't know what we're doing but what we
should do... What gets me about this whole argument is that it boils down to "Don't tell me about economics, market forces, deregulation, technology, bad management practices in the industry, capitalism, enjoying your job, or human nature -- IT'S YOUR FAULT I DON'T HAVE AS MUCH MONEY AS I WANT"
Nobody wants anyone else to be out of a job. Yes, JB will most definitely have its time in the barrel at some point. And the legacies will come out of this long-inevitable shake-up looking very different -- they'll streamline, reorganize, redefine their strengths, and find their new niches, and people will go on flying from A to B. There will be pain, but there won't be pilots starving on the street. Pilot salaries will probably never be as relatively high as they once were, that's just a fact. But this blame game is counter-productive bordering on pathetic. We should all fight for fair compensation -- with that I wholeheartedly agree. But to ignore the big picture is, well... ignorant. A better debate might be over what exactly is fair compensation, given all these other factors. And someone who honestly says that they can't enjoy this job for less than $250K / year has probably made a very bad career choice, in my opinion.
P.S. A spell-checker would not have changed "weather" to "whether"