I work a pretty good desk job because and only because I can't make my student loan payment on airline pay. It's too bad, I think would make a good airline pilot. At this point the only flying I do is a little skydiving flying. I figure it will be several years before airline pay at the entry level bumps up. Even then it won't be much, they will simply offer more one-time incentives. The airlines are very reluctant to bump up payscales, because once they do it can't come back down. A similar thing happens at my corporation. They want you to work hard and reach for the sky but they do not want to raise your base pay. They will gladly give you a bonus this year, heck how about every year, but you can forget anything more than a skimpy base payraise no matter how much you achieve. It simply cheaper to give bonuses once twice thrice or indefinitely than it is to commit to a base pay raise that never goes away. They are not stupid and it's all about the money. When airlines determine that one-time incentives are not working anymore, just watch as the payscales go up.

The same thing happened a number of years ago in the trucking industry. For many years the base payscale for truckers was in the neighborhood of .20-.30 cents a mile. A driver shortage occurred in the 90's, and you started seeing the inevitable sign-on incentives. $500 sign on bonus, new truck, extra good route, guaranteed minimum miles, that sort of thing. But the shortage continued to the point where most companies were really losing money and freight was not being moved. Guess what, in 1998 the payscale finally bumped up to over .50 cents a mile and has been there ever since. In that case, the first company to do it was JBHunt, and then soon after all the others followed. For the first time you started seeing low-seniority truck drivers starting out at over $50k. No trucking companies folded because of this policy, and in fact most have prospered despite the increases in fuel.