Originally Posted by iaflyer

One of the issues is that ALPA tied their pay wagon to increasing pay for pax count and weight of the airplane in the 1950s. Airplanes kept growing in size, so it seemed like a great way to assure constant increases in pay. However, we have past "peak airplane size" and now the best airplane for US airline seems to be a 737 for domestic and a medium widebody like a A330 or B787 for the international. Both of which are a decrease in size from the biggest airplane that used to be flown in both those type of markets, meaning a decrease in overall pay. Delta used to fly the L-1011 domestically (and it's replacement, the 767-400 was originally only domestic). Obviously, the B747 was the Northwest international airplane.

Because both the sizes have gone down, the number of wide body Capts have gone down too. Pay banding works at UPS because I suspect it was the original pay structure.

I just can't see how we would get to a paybanding setup like Small Narrow body (A220, B717 and M88) , Medium narrow body (B737/A320, B757) and Widebody B767/A330/B767-400/A350 without cries of "unfair pay raise" and "they got a high percentage raise than I did".