Originally Posted by
MarkVI
1.) Aviation is comperable to other skilled professions. Go live on a medical intern or resident salary and tell me how you feel. You're flying a smaller plane, doing most of the scut work, getting your ass kicked by awful schedules. Cry me a river -- EVERY skilled career, be it a doctor, lawyer, or airline pilot starts out at the bottom of the compensation ladder with the worst quality of life. Stop acting like aviation is somehow more sacred than the intern prescribing your grandmothers medicine. How many hours has that intern worked, how many orders have they filled, and how many reports do they have to write for their resident? And what's their compensation?
Airline pilots have it the best we've had it in a long time, and I'm making more than my friend whos in his residency. I'm home more (and I commute). I have more free time. You arbitrarily throw out $150K as the base starting for an airline pilot, but the truth is if you got that you'd still complain. You're stuck on the hedonic treadmill, plain and simple.
You completely missed the point. Or you purposefully misquoted me to prove yours. I said a
Captain should make $150k, not that $150k should be the base starting salary. I never said or implied that aviation is MORE sacred than other professions. My attitude is far from it. Just that it should pay more LIKE other professional occupations. But if you want to argue for less pay...by all means go for it.
Originally Posted by
MarkVI
2.) OR, and hear me out on this, bad word of mouth spreads based on a video. That word of mouth leads to a loss of pilots, which causes CCF to skyrocket, which in turn leads to a loss of flying when AA realizes we can't staff our routes. So, rather than providing better compensation, AA (who's in fiscal turmoil as it is) decides to start pinching pennies, and all the sudden that magical quality of life you're looking for gets further away. There's always at least two paths every story can go down. Just because you have the lofty idea that the idealistic and altruistic executives in Dallas will realize they need to float cash to PSA to solve the problem doesn't mean that's what they'll do.
Do your research before throwing out hypotheticals. CLT is the most profitable hub the world's largest airline. AAG is not hemorrhaging cash to pay us. Quite the opposite. They are making tons of cash because of the support that PSA provides to the CLT hub. Furthermore, the reason that they have been growing PSA is because we are already cheaper than the non W/O options.
It's not just about my ideas on the matter... If you observe the regional industry as a whole, other regional options are largely downsizing or consolidating. It starts to become pretty obvious that the remaining options for taking the place of PSA are either more expensive, or have fleet teething issues of their own. But if you want to help weaken our collective bargaining position by buying into, or even promoting management-style scare tactics, that's your right to do so...