“You get what you pay for.”

That’s actually a best case scenario. Sometimes you get a whole lot less.

When first year pay - counting time in the schoolhouse - is actually LESS than the first year pay at most regionals - and you are headed into an era of higher pilot demand and less supply, when even the military services are offering big bonuses for their flyers to stick around, you are foolish if you don’t realize what will eventually come of treating your newbies like cr@p.

It doesn’t matter what you got paid a decade ago...or even three years ago. Who knows when you might get another contract, or how much farther this already embarrassingly low pay will compare to what the market is paying then. If you aren’t competitive then you are going to get the dregs. Do you seriously think some of these regional managements are doing $50K signing bonuses or paying for RTP hours for guys out of the goodness of their hearts? They are paying what the market is forcing them to pay.

You can reminisce all you want about what you got paid and it is just as irrelevant as old timers talking about their learning to fly in a $3000 Tri-Pacer burning eight gallons an hour of 80-87 that cost them 60 cents a gallon. H€||, there was a time you could buy the whole of Manhattan Island for $24 worth of trinkets too. But that time ain’t now.