Originally Posted by
golfandfly
The "seniority problem" is only a problem for someone hired at a lower tiered company. Guys hired at ATA/Aloha/Midwest knew that their company pays lousy wages and has bad work rules. Who's problem is that? You should have picked a better company (if you were qualified) so you could have been the lower time copilot. If you are a 15,000 hour Midwest captain, you made some bad decisions. Don't blame the 3,000 regional kid because he made better decisions or just got lucky.....
I've started over a few times in the business and was slinging gear for younger, less experienced pilots. I didn't whine about it, I take responsibility for my decisions....
I must take issue with this - as a former ATA pilot, I had pretty decent work rules, industry leading vacation rules, and decent compensation. When you factored our compensation against the days worked, we probably did close to as well as anyone out there (maybe not industry leading, but in the middle of the pack). I knew of numerous captains who worked less than half the month and earned close to or north of $200K per year.
I'm not blaming anyone, but the whole seniority system evolved under very different circumstances than exist today (namely stable airlines in a regulated environment). The system as it currently exists is broken, and I'm not sure how to equitably fix it. We should have instituted a national seniority list back in the Eastern days, but as usual self interest prevailed over the common good, and now here we are (much like SCOPE).