Originally Posted by
rickair7777
Sort of.
CMO staffing is (obviously) determined by the size of the airline. I know personally of one airline which was under increasing and draconian scrutiny from their CMO (co-located with airline HQ which happened to be in a very nice geographic location)...well the airline threatened to move some HQ functions and their certificate to another base (which was a decidedly NOT very nice geographic local). The CMO got in line real quick, even the line pilots saw the difference.
In this particular case, IMO the CMO was out of line to begin with, essentially implementing personal vendettas. But just goes to show that the FAA may not be as impartial as one might expect.
If that ever seems like the case, it should be worked at a high level, by your congress representative, by contacting the FAA managers, and so on. These people have telephones and they are not secret. They are also bound to investigate complaints from the public. You can hold them accountable for this, it's just that many times people are "scared" to talk to them, thinking that there's some sort of magical power they have to somehow harass or affect them. Those of us that are trying to uphold the faith of the American people do not need any "bad seeds" trying to undermine it, ultimately it just makes our job harder in the end to let those kind of attitudes persist or exist.
That said, staffing positions are determined by the size and complexity of the airline. More complex airline=more people and to some extent, higher pay for the more complex position, but there's no direct relationship as claimed before, it doesn't work like that. You might get authorized to hire more people if an airline gains airplanes and becomes bigger (but not always!), but there are only about 3 pay-grades that active inspectors exist at, and only two where they have oversight (assigned airlines and certificates), so it's generally not a wide range of pay. The only way to get an increase in pay is to get a step-increase (longevity that increases the first few years and then every few years after that, gradually tapering off) or get a promotion to the next grade, which takes applying and getting selected for a job. You can sometimes get a pay increase by a grade by taking a temporary detail, but that's usually a double-edged sword, may turn into permanent, may put you right back where you started. Most inspectors are either topped out in grade or one grade away from topping out though, because the 2-grade span I mentioned above is where you have the ability to have oversight, which makes you "useful" as an inspector. Point I'm getting to is that there isn't much range in grade and pay.