Originally Posted by
biigD
Delta has a pretty good contract, and the company is making tons of money.
Look, I commute on you guys, love your product, and want you to be successful. I'm just a dumb airline pilot, but it seems to me that you guys can get paid what you deserve while still having a profitable airline.
Solid... One of my favorite mental exercises during a boring leg is to try and figure out how many of the schlubs in back would it take, if all of their ticket money went directly to me, to fully compensate me for this work?
In other words, you've got 130 people behind you on a 3 hour leg, and their average ticket was $250. My compensation for 3 hours is $345. That means I get 1.38 passengers' worth of $$. 1.38 out of 130 pax. Make it 2 people instead, and that's a $51/hour pay raise.
Management toots the "labor is too expensive" horn so often, even we start to believe it, but we take a tiny fraction of the yield on a typical flight.