Originally Posted by
deadreckoning
I cannot get over the fact that regional pilots act like grade school children compared with other 121/135, corporate and even flight instructors.
I read forums, talk with major/LCC, 135, 91 pilots and flight instructors, and cannot get over the fact that regional pilots (not all but most) are very juvenile. The comments I hear and read regarding the industry are at times idiotic. I rarely read any corporate or major/lcc (or even flight instructors) sling so many insulting comments at one another as I do regional pilots.
Why is this? Besides the age (mostly newbies) in the regional industry, there's no reason we should be behaving like this. Nobody's d**k is that much bigger than the next guys, but yet most of you need to puff your chests out and throw insults at each other.
We are all in the same game, suck it up and try to act like men. If we would just stick together we could make a change, but I fear we are too far gone to have that happen.
Instead lets just keep slinging sh*t and bring this industry even farther down the drain.
Easy answer--it's social psychology 101--we are a tribal species.
Where does more violent crime take place? Trailer parks/inner-city ghettoes? Or high-income suburbs? We all know the answer.
In every human society since the beginning of time, the poorest and most downtrodden classes in the social hierarchy tend to organize themselves into tribes/gangs/clans based on shared symbols such as neighborhood/ethnicity/family relationships (or regional airline brand)...no individual tribe at that level of society is big enough or powerful enough to totally annihilate all the others, so an endless cycle of honor killings, verbal disses, and turf wars ensue...this principle of human social organization transcends race, national boundaries, and industries--it most certainly explains the juvenille "my regional is better than yours" phenomena you are referring to.
At the bottom of the barrel--where short-term survival is the prime directive--humans revert to a primal state and organize into fragmented groups--all trying to bash and stomp down the other groups to avoid being the "bottom of the bottom."
If the gangs/clans/regionals had the luxury of thinking rationally, with a long-term perspective, they could easily set down arms, band together, and collectively raise the status of ALL individuals in their overall socioeconomic class.
But no--that is not how humans operate in a state of poverty and despair--when we are in poverty and despair, we'll do or say anything to our peer groups to: 1) Make ourselves feel better about our rank in life, and 2) Attempt to hold on to what little we have, while possibly snagging slightly more for oursevles at the expense of a rival gang/regional.
Given all of the above, I am very confident that if any legacy simply stapled any regional underling, giving those regional pilots the job stability, respect, income, and benefits of "real" legacy pilots, the behavior to which you are referring would be drastically reduced--overnight.
Turf wars/bragging rights/competitions still occur at the legacy level (Airways East vs. America West comes to mind), but only when there is an immediate, large threat to one of the tribal groups' income/survival.