Originally Posted by WEACLRS

I spent 15 years in non-aviation fortune 500 middle and senior management. My average work week was 55 to 60 hours, 10 to 11 hour days. Up at 5:30am and in the car at 6:30 to commute 45 minutes to work so as to be in the office by 7:15 to answer (mostly ignore) 75 to 150 emails and vmails a day. By 8:30a my door was revolving with people and meetings (I had a staff of 75 in the last position) until 6:00p or so. I would work at my desk until 7:30 or 8:00p trying to clear up the critical stuff, drive 35 minutes home, and get in around 9:00. Have dinner with the wife, review a little material for tomorrow, and hit the sack at 11:00p to do it all over again. My fellow directors and I would go into the office on Saturday's from 9 - 3 to clean up as much of the week's desk work as possible. I would take Saturday evening and Sunday morning off. Sunday evening I would work at the home office preparing for Monday. I spent most of the time tired and in a fog.

I traveled an average of 8 nights a month away from home. I never saw a three-day weekend like Labor day completely off. I never had two weeks off in a row - at most one week every other year and I spent at least some of it on the phone or internet on company business. My request for a week of vacation was almost always meet with "do you have to go now?" or "you can take the week of Christmas off."

The best retirement plan I had was a 2.5% 401k company match. I saw a bonus only one year (even though I spent seven years working in the "high flying dot-com era"). I had stock options twice (once it was a lot of stock options), both times they expired worthless (80% of all stock options issued do expire worthless). I never saw an annual raise more than 1.25%. The only way to make more money was to get promoted. Period. The only way to just keep your job was to do at least the amount of work described above.

After 15 years I walked into my office to see the head of HR and my boss standing there. My position was eliminated in a company reorganization without regard to seniority or tenure or notice (it happen three times in 15 years). I was asked to be out the door in less than 30 minutes.

As a pilot, I'm home more, see my wife more, have a better retirement plan, far better insurance, a number of guys below me that would go before I do, union job protection, job security like I have never had before, and an activity I love to do. I can earn more sitting at home on reserve doing nothing than I made as a 8 year middle manager. I'm still adjusting to having more than three days off in a row.

We need to fight like h*** to keep it and improve it, because of the number of people lives we have daily in our hands, the level of professionalism required to safely do the job, and the consequences of even minor failure.

Management experience's the above in their daily lives and do not understand ours. They only interact on a daily basis with other management personal and management pilots who don't fly regularly. They think we should be made to work the hours they do. They don't understand fatigue. All they know is the fog of their lives and think we should be able to operate aircraft in the same tired fog.

Sorry for the rant.