boilerpilot

Now, before I begin, I want to say that I'm going to make a few generalizations about costs, because different airlines have different costs. When I say that I'm making an assumption, I'm making an assumption based off of averages, rather than an assumption off of pure whim, so please don't throw out my "assumptions" because of the term I happened to use, or because it may be off by a little for your specific airline; while one average might be high for your airline, it might be low for another. For instance, SWA pilots with their general superiority and dashing good looks might fly 1000 hours a year, while the surly, mirror shattering group over at Delta might only fly 600 (I mean no offense!). Still averages out to the number I used below of 800 hours a year.

My second note is that I started this tangent in my head on another thread, but decided not to threadjack and instead give it its own thread. Therefore, please bear with me as I talk a little about the term "whipsaw" for a couple sentences before I get into the meat of the argument.

I hate the term whipsaw. It's worthless. Pilot cost is so minimal compared to the cost of operating separate businesses it's laughable. Differences between pilot costs become even more trivial. Sure, managemant may care about whipsawing Compass vs ASA vs Pinnacle vs Mesaba vs Comair, but honestly, the fact that on average a Compass FO makes $3 an hour more than an ASA FO makes (doesn't matter if it's true, random numbers) is TRIVIAL in the overall cost of the company, even if it adds up to a couple million. The benefits of merging those two pilot groups together for medical insurance alone saves well more than that $3 an hour per pilot. All I'm saying is that the famous whipsaw was termed by pilots because they see their $3 an hour difference as extremely important, but in the grand scheme of things, if you fly 800 hours a year at an average 80% load factor(comparing ASA 900 to Compass E175), that $3 raise costs less than a nickel a passenger! The real "whipsaw" mainline management is using is between the management of the regionals.


When talking about the cost of a pilot, the most thing to remember are the economies of scale are factoring into the cost, but when you consider the cost of a ticket (third quarter of 2008 was the highest in 13 years at $362 on average for a domestic round trip ticket) we literally cost almost NOTHING. Now, about $50 goes to the government in form of various taxes, security fees, improvement taxes, etc, so that's still $312 that goes to the airline. Assuming (ah!) an average Domestic FO costs around $150k a year, an average CA around $200k a year (including company insurance, benefits, pay, training, etc), so that's $350k a year for the flight crew. Now take an average 800 hours of flying a 140 seat aircraft at an 80% load factor taking an average domestic stage length of about 1:45 (just under 700 SM), that means you fly 25,600 roundtrip passengers per year, meaning you and your FO generate $7,987,200 a year. It also means that the cockpit crew's TOTAL cost (even the costs that you don't see like training and new mirrors in the Delta crew rooms) out of that ticket is about 4.4%, or about $13.67 per ticket. If you take the 100k or so of intangible costs (so training, the airline's insurance against you messing up, etc) off the FO and CA, that number drops to about 3.1% or about $9.77 per ticket. Because tickets are generally the only income source for airlines, simple logic allows us to say that the TOTAL cost for the pilots of a legacy/major is about 4.4%. The regionals are even worse at around 3.4% and 2% for their respective percentages.

Shocking. Isn't it.