I think the biggest argument most RJ pilots have is that the pay scale is not proportionate to the major airlines. Yes, RJ pilots fly less people. However, RJ pilots should be paid at a scale that is proportionate to the major airlines in relation to the number of “souls on board”. If a 777 5th year FO gets paid $155 per hour to fly 386 passengers that equates to $.40 per person per hour. A 5th year RJ FO should make that as well. Otherwise, then what the company is telling the RJ pilot, AND his/her customers, is that their lives are not as valuable as the lives on the Legacy airline. Make sense? Let's see if the math checks out.

If you take the first year pay from a Legacy airline's pay table (Delta in this case) and average it per person for the average number of seats on their airframes, you get a number that is the average pay per seat, per hour. Example, let's say Delta's median size aircraft, the 737-900, holds 177 seats. Their first year pay is $66 per hour. If we do that division we get $.37 per seat, per hour. If you apply that figure to a 50 seat RJ you get $18.60. That happens to be less than most regional airlines’ first year FO pay. If you do the same calculation for Delta's smallest aircraft, the 717, that equates to $28.20 per hour for a 50 seat RJ. That is much higher than most regional airlines’ 1st year pay. Let's do the same with the 5th year FO on a 717 at Delta. At $112 per hour that is $1.06 per person per hour, which equates to $52.83 per hour for a 5th year RJ FO at that rate. At AE the 5th year rate is $40 per hour. That's a significant pay difference. If you do the same for a 10 year CA on a Delta 717 that is $1.54 per person per hour which equates to $77.35 per hour for an AE 10 year Captain. Currently that CA gets $82. If we do the same for a 10 yr 777 CA they get $.65 per person per hour, which equates to $32.51 per hour for a 10 year RJ CA. That is obviously way worse than what a 10 yr RJ CA makes ($82).

I agree that a regional airline pilot feels like pay is extremely low, and in some cases there is definitely an argument for that. I also agree that the bigger the airplane the more expensive it is and that cost is factored into the pay for a mainline pilot. But even with that factor, the math tells us that the per person per hour cost for an RJ pilot IRT a mainline pilot isn’t too far skewed. The slap in the face then mainly comes from the fact that it’s a highly specialized field, with very expensive training, that takes many years to attain proficiency, that makes more life saving decisions per day than most professions do in a lifetime, only to be compensated the same as low technical fields that don’t require high amounts of human capital (restaurant worker, retail, bus driver, etc).

I think I just blacked out…..what happened….where are my pants?.....