Originally Posted by
Cubdriver
I am not absolutely sure about this but I suspect Colgan 3407 may have been a result of market failure to adequately create reasonable wages for low end airline pilots. It certainly looks that way to me. My point is again, that boundaries need to be defined when and if the markets run afoul of sensible minimums. If a full time worker earns less than enough to sleep and eat each day, something is wrong. We can eliminate the job which is not good for the greater majority, this case the traveling public, or we can regulate wages to a safe minimum. Hopefully the people and their government are smart enough to do this before airplanes crash. This is not always the case unfortunately, as reactive regulation is more common than proactive regulation.
The part in bold was the first point I had tried to make. There is no minimum for pilots and I feel that is a failure of the regulatory system that taxpayers spend so much to keep in place.
In italics, I agree completely. Yes, it is a failure of the regulatory system, unions, and companies all together that this is where we are at. In many ways I blame the RLA and NMB for being laws so union and company friendly that they leave the employee out in the rain, starving.
The sentence underlined is two part. The general traveling public is still somewhat ignorant to what pilot wages are. Even all the education attempted after colgan fell on a largely deaf public. So maybe there's no getting people to learn. And of all the congressional regulation that came into effect recently, nothing directly regulates a pilots wage. The "1500 hour rule" was supposed to use market forces to drive up wages. In some ways it has, and in some ways (ref. Great Lakes) its still business as usual. Even as pilots leave in mass with nobody coming up the pipeline. The second underlined sentence, yes, regulation has always been reactive rather than proactive.
Somebody referenced that regional pilots must just need second jobs. That is what I had to do given my paycheck and situation. But does the flying public really want pilots flying them who are putting in 16 hour duty days and working a second job as much as possible just to survive? But again, this is an education issue.