Originally Posted by
Boneman
Just considering the "Legacy" carriers, the mean salary is $119.83/hour. Multiply that by 1,000 hours (which few actually fly per year) and that is $119,830. Add a few benefits and subtract a few expenses, it probably comes out about right. You can take this out as far as you want by adding FedEx and UPS or AirTran, Alaska, JetBlue, etc., etc. I think you would see a drastic lowering of the salary if you begin to add regional and commuters into the mix.
Not that simple. When you figured the mean salary of the "Legacy" carriers, did you just average their pay charts? You need to take into account that for all the Legacies except CAL, the bottom 6-7 years don't matter since no one's been hired since then. I'd guess that for American, half the guys still working have maxed out the paychart at 12 years or greater. You could make the bottom of the paychart $5 an hour for all the legacies for the first five years and it wouldn't change anyone's actual pay.
Also, I'd have little faith in the "hourly pay x 1000" method of determining pay. I know that for SWA that doesn't work for most of the guys I know.
Additionally the BLS numbers do not take into account any bonus or profit sharing.