Originally Posted by
rickair7777
True to a certain extent. The million dollar question is where is the breaking point? I suspect that airlines could employ a few more pilots, and pay better wages for regional FO's (especially first year) without driving ticket costs by more than a few cents or a dollar or two. Folks are not going to cancel their vacation or weekend plans for the price of a latte (a small latte).
Looking at an arbitrary (non-bottom feeder) regional airline (ASA)... take a 6 year CA and a 4 year FO on a 70-seat jet (I don't know how many seats are installed, call it 70 though):
$71+$41= $111 hourly cost for flight crew.
Add in some extra to account for benefits and overhead, lets call it about $180 cost to the company.
For a one hour flight, each pax on a full flight would pay $2.57 for the flight crew.
Assume 75% loads, this goes up to an average of $3.43 per pax.
Now raise that by a mere $0.57 to $4/pax and you get an extra $40 for the crew. Since regional unions will cheerfully and aggressively throw their junior pilots under the bus, assume that $30 of that will go to the captain (putting him in a six-figure tax bracket) and $10 to the FO...so the FO now makes $50/hour, which is probably a liveable wage for a few years in moderate cost-of-living locals.
That's an interesting math experiement. Here's another one using ASA. 1st year pay for an FO at ASA comes to $20,700. Let's say we want to nearly double that to $40,500 or $45 an hour. That would add $22 cost per flight hour to the overall cost or 44 cents per passenger per ticket per hour on the 50 seater or 31.5 cents on the 70 seater. On a 2 hour flight we are talking less than $1 per passenger to give the FO a livable wage. I know everything is governed by supply and demand but is anyone really going to say, "Screw it the trip to Disney World is off, the price of the ticket went up $1."
Now obviously everyone (Captains, FAs, mechanics, etc.) would want a piece of the pie but imagine if we could raise the average price of a ticket by $10. We could do so much good for everyone involved with the company. That's an extra $500 per hour revenue on the 50 seater or $700 on the 70 seaters. Obviously that isn't guarenteed since we don't fly 100% load factors but even 70% load factors would generate $350 and $490 per hour extra respectively. That's a lot of money that could be split between all of the employees. It's wishful thinking I know, but I think it also illustrates that huge swings in flight crew salaries (up or down) don't significantly add or subtract from the cost of the ticket.
Imagine if we got the TSA to be more efficient and kept more of the face value price of the ticket instead of giving it to those clowns. Ticket prices wouldn't have to go up and we'd all be making respectable salaries.