The other day there was a comment by a major airline CEO (can't remember who) who was asked, "Now that fuel prices have plummeted, are you going to pass along those savings to customers?" His answer, of course, was 'He** no." (Not in those exact words.)

As others have stated, regional airlines exist purely to provide a C scale of pay for the majors who either own them or contract them out. In my industry (advertising and design), there's a similar thing...it's called outsourcing tech development (and sometimes Photoshop work) to Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Eastern Europe. The reason we don't do it often is that the quality is usually terrible; you get what you pay for. So we pay much higher rates to attract top-level talent. If we didn't, our product would suffer.

The majors, however, don't suffer from the same lack of product quality when they hire pilots at $24/hr to drive 76-seat jets around. Flights don't suddenly become more dangerous or more turbulent or less reliable just because they are flown by pilots who are paid a fraction of what mainline pilots are paid. So, the majors have no incentive - zero – to change this situation.

I'm sure that if Jeff Smisek and his fellow CEOs could get their pilot unions to agree, they'd outsource 777s to their regional partners. And you know there'd be people lining up to fly them for $24/hr.

In terms of classical economic theory, economic models always assume that actors in a marketplace 1) have perfect information, and 2) act completely rationally. #1 never used to be remotely possible, although the Internet has now made pilot-pay-related information vastly more accessible and universal. However, number 2 is the Achilles heel for all of us pilots. As pilots, we are not rational actors. We are clearly quite willing to invest many tens of thousands of dollars and years of our lives training for an occupation that will make it extremely difficult for us to recoup that investment in a reasonable timeframe.

Why? Because we love to fly. We love to fly in a way that no accountant loves to prepare tax filings. We love to fly in a way that no corporate lawyer loves to prepare 500-page court filings. It is this emotion that makes the entire airline industry possible. Without it, there would be no C scale. There would be no B scale. There'd only be an A scale.

But as the love for flight is unlikely to be erased from the human psyche anytime soon (until the day fully-autonomous airliners are created), the current situation is unlikely to change.

And to bring it all back to my first point: Regardless of all the rules, and seniority, and double-time pay and deadhead pay and soft pay and hard pay and user pay and Lord knows what else...I believe pilots should be paid from the time they report for duty until the time they are released. That is all I am really saying. Everything else can follow from that.