Nice use of a fancy word. That would be a good one for the GMATs.

Sure you can compare economic productivity. The 300-ish pilots at Great Lakes are a significant cog in the process that allows Great Lakes to bring in 138M in gross revenue in 2012. The loss of even a portion of those pilots puts that future "138M" in jeopardy. You don't think you can derive a measurable economic contribution of a Great Lakes pilot to Great Lakes Aviation, LTD as I could a software engineer at Microsoft and make a comparison? Sure you can.

And you could take it one step further than that. Look at the "Airlines for America" home page. They say that, "Commercial aviation helps drive more than 10M American jobs and 5 cents of every dollar of U.S. GDP." So according to the industry's own trade group, apparently Part 121 pilots play a significant role in our country's economy. Just like a nurse. Or a software engineer. I'm sure an ambitious economics student could write an interesting paper making comparisons between the economic contribution of a Part 121 airline pilot vs. a software engineer vs. a nurse vs. a McDonald's employee vs. a housewife to a given economy. All measureable.

If they can't increase fares then Mr. Voss is going to have to eat his losses until the contract can be rebid. Sometimes when one bids a job, it doesn't turn out as profitable as originally planned. Maybe he should have heeded Mr. Cohen's (RAA mouthpiece) numerous public statements about an "upcoming pilot shortage" and bid his contracts accordingly with that future cost baked in. Oh well. He can pay a market wage to his pilots or he can watch them walk out the door or he can choose to fold the whole operation up.