Originally Posted by
Urbandrone
A guy hired today makes 60K his first year as a first officer. A year later he upgrades and pay increases to 62/hr and gets the 23K bonus for a total of 85K a year. This is a good outlook. Plus the year after he is guaranteed an interview with Delta.
A guy hired 6 years ago... He's already a captain and if he wanted to move on to Delta has about a 70% chance of that having happened (The SSP acceptance was way over 50%.. the numbers are published it was about 70% acceptance rate per pilot participating after the second interview) If this pilot is bidding for over 80 hrs credit he is earning 95K this year, plus per diem, plus performance bonus. This guy is in the 89th income percentile of the US.
As pilots we are blessed. The company is doing us well and treating us well for an entry level airline job. The pilots annual income here tops out at $112,000 per year. The top has also caught up at Endeavor. Guys complaining need to open their eyes, they are facing first world problems.
First off the top guys (over 20 year) are still not whole from the pre bankruptcy concessions. Both the payscales and the damage that PBS has done still affect them. Next, the SSP has not offered jobs to anywhere near 70% of the pilots. Maybe 50% of eligible pilots have been given offers... now some of that is because of Delta turning down a lot of captains, likely out of fear of inability to replace them here as much as them not being "Delta material" and some is simply we have a LOT of lifers here that will only leave because of age or the company shutting down. If a flow were offered today, that simply required you to say the word yes, nothing more. Not even have to log on a computer to check the box, just say "yes" we'd probably still only see about 15% of the top 300 take it, and thus short of GoJets or SkyWest going out of business affording us growth in DTW and MSP, there will be almost no captain movement in DTW or MSP for the predictable future. Once the bonus is converted to pay rates, I'm betting that % will drop even lower.