More from that slime ball Roger Cohen. Pay, Rest, Stand up overnights,







The regulations and shared responsibility that have been built over decades and decades [are] giving American travelers the safest system of transportation the world has ever known. ...

Help me understand how these business arrangements work. They call it code shares, but what it is is contracting out flying. What's the relationship like?

I have never seen one of these contracts.

You've never seen one, really?

I honest to God [have] never seen one. ...

But you must understand the basic framework of the business.

... It can vary carrier to carrier, year to year.

But is it really one level of safety?

All right. But crew rest, that's an issue that's been discussed for years and years and years. What is changing now? Why are you looking at that at this moment?

We have been great participants in the study of the federally convened review of this whole issue of what is the appropriate amount of flying rest, because conditions have changed in the industry since the rules were set in place. As you know, sometimes rules in aviation do get a little bit dusty.

For the longest time it was considered that age 60 was some magic number there; that the day you were 60 -- if you were 59 and 364 days you were safe to fly, and the day you turned 60 you weren't any longer. It took a long time for everyone to recognize that needed to get changed. We're moving this issue right now in terms of the writing of the rules for crew flight and duty time and rest. This is moving at the fastest that any rulemaking has ever been moved in certainly my experience, and I think everybody at the FAA would say so, too. ...

The crews, as it stands now, with the work rules and the way the rest periods are built, are being pushed, aren't they?

Every crew at any airline is operating not only within this broad parameter of what the federal rules require, but in an envelope much, much smaller than that. ... The schedules are created to try and eliminate fatigue, try to avoid it, to try to make the schedules as safe as can possibly be.

But the schedules as they are, per the rules, are not good, are they?

The rules right now needed to be reviewed. They are being done so. We are at the forefront of reviewing and revising those rules. ...

I've heard them called standups or camping trips. These are the guys that go out late at night, fly a flight. They've got four hours of downtime at an airport, and they have to fly back in the morning. Classic recipe for fatigue. That's not a good way to make for a well-rested flight crew, right?

... It's important to kind of explain how the trips are established. Trips are set up there that allow for each pilot to bid on trips, and some of the trips that may seem the most difficult may be the most popular trips because those trips may allow that pilot the most time off. And so it's each pilot's choice. But no matter if it's choosing A, B, C or D or E schedule, every schedule that's out there right now is being done safely, is within the rules and is being done to try and accommodate the needs of the traveling public.

But if you've got a guy who's there for four hours on an overnight, they don't give him a hotel -- we hear these stories time and again -- they are literally unrolling a sleeping bag and sleeping at the airport, does that make any sense?

Again, the schedules that are out there are safe. ...

So why do you want to fix them?

Because they need to be made safer and based more on what we are learning and science and everything. Again, everything in aviation safety is to reduce and reduce down to the most narrow element any of the risks, and so if there are some things we can learn and we can do to both mitigate fatigue, create schedules that do better fit into all of that, we're going to do it.

Let's talk about a related issue, and that's pilot pay. And this comes up quite a bit. First officers at a typical regional airline [are] making on the order of $18,000 and $20,000 when they start out. That's a pretty low wage, but I don't know that people are aware that the pay scales are so low. Is that an adequate salary for what that job entails?

Let's get the facts out on the table on this, Miles. The average salary for a regional airline captain is $73,000. The average salary for a first officer at a regional airline is about $32,000, $33,000.

Average is kind of a hard thing to get your hands on, because, especially with the economy slowing down, you've got a lot of more senior first officers, and so the pay scale may have crept up a little bit, but even at $30,000 a year, if you're based in New York City, you're not living large, are you?

We have 60,000 regional airline employees around the country. There are roughly about 400,000 airline employees nationwide living in 600 communities, many of whom earn less than that, and they find it very affordable to live in those communities. So it's absolutely doable.

So the pay scales are adequate.

The pay is fair. It's very comparable. ... Compensation in the airline industry, ... it's built on a number of foundations. Number one, seniority. Number two -- and I think this is really important to know -- the wage scales are collectively bargained. They are done by the unions, and the gap there between that, if there is a gap between what the first officer makes and what that captain makes, that's because the pie is being split that way; that everybody else said: "Well, I had to do my time in the barrel going back years and years. You do, too." So that pie is split up basically because of the collective bargaining.

So basically you are saying it's the unions that have sort of forsaken their more junior members.

I don't want to cast aspersions. Again, these are collectively bargained. ...

What the unions will say is, first of all, many of these contract carriers are not [part of] a union, and in many cases the flying contracts get moved around so much, and these contract carriers have been serving various masters, and sometimes it gets mixed around, and the deals get to be cut, that it's difficult for the unions to keep up with all of this. ... The bottom line is one of the key advantages from the legacy carriers' perspective is that the labor costs, because they can separate it out from the collective bargaining agreements that they have with their pilots, are much cheaper, aren't they?

... Let's talk about compensation, and in addition to the compensation, ... crew members get a generous per diem while they are on a trip, all ... their expenses while they are traveling on company business.

Per diems are just expenses, though. You can't count them as income. By the way, is that included in that $30,000 average?

No, that is not. ... But then again, this is a job that most pilots are working 70, 75, 80 hours per month as opposed to a 40-hour work weeks that most Americans do.

Right. But you know as well as I do that's the time when the engine is running that we are talking about. There's a lot more time involved in that job which is not included in that.

But again, most contracts provide that most crew members have 12, 13, 14 days off a month. ...

I'm still trying to drive out why their pay is so little. Why? They are not paid a lot of money. I don't get it. It seems like, on that dark and stormy night, I want somebody up there driving who is well rested and well paid. Is that too much to ask?

... What every traveler wants is a person up there flying them who is professional, who is highly trained and is capable and skilled at flying, which every one of our crew members is.

So the amount -- you don't think that whether it's $16,000 or even $30,000, whatever that amount is, union would say: "Hey, let's start them at $50,000 or $60,000. We're going to get more experienced people; we're going to get a better-quality, a more professional flight crew"?

We believe strongly in the professionalism of everybody who is flying for us. And as you know, people enter into aviation really because, number one, it's a passion, and this is something that people voluntarily do. They don't get drafted into doing this. They gain tremendous skills that they can use and move around later on in their life.

The most important thing is it doesn't matter what anybody is making. And the NTSB, through all of its investigations, has never found compensation to be a contributing factor to any fatal accident, so I think the key point here is that everybody who is flying, it's important that they are fit and that they are sufficiently trained and capable of doing it, which they are.

You are right. They haven't listed compensation as a contributing cause, but many times they list fatigue. And I would say those two issues go hand in hand, because what you are talking about here, when you are paying that person $18,000, $20,000 or even $30,000, to tell them they are based in New York City, you are telling them they have to live somewhere else, and that means they have to commute, and that means there is a fatigue issue.

They're commuting. Let's take these issues one by one, and get on the table, number one, is that compensation does not equate to safety -- no linkage, none whatsoever. Never has been, never will be. Number two, commuting. ...

If you happen to be stuck in a high-dollar city with this low wage, you don't have much of a choice in the matter. And yes, commuting has always been a part of aviation, but if you are a Sully [Capt. Chesley Sullenberger] and you are commuting, you can afford a hotel. If you are making $16,000 or $18,000 a year and commuting, you are sleeping on the Barcalounger in the pilots' lounge. And that's not good, is it?

Again, let's get the real numbers out there. Average pay for the first officer: $32,000.

I'm not talking about average. There are some people, as you well know, who make $18,000 to $20,000 a year. That's 21 bucks an hour; they are getting capped out at $1,000. I mean, you know there are people at that scale who have to live this life. We're not talking about average. We are talking about human beings who are flying my grandmother to Buffalo. So there are people there living this life, and it seems as if they are in an untenable position economically.

Absolutely not, because there are many other people who earn less money than that and work more days in these communities that can afford it and do it and do it responsibly. I just checked the Web this morning. You can get a hotel room at the Newark airport for $50 a night.

I bet $50 a night might be something to think about at that salary.

... Airline employees, non-airline employees, commuting is a choice. It is not forced by the economics.

This is not a salary that matches the location of some of these bases, and there is no compensation for that fact. These airlines don't factor in that.

But every single pilot -- before they can apply for the job -- every flight attendant knows where bases are, where they could be stationed, where they could be moved. This is all part of the collective bargaining agreement. When bases do change, crews get changed around for whatever reason, all of that is covered by the contracts, the expenses of moving them. ...

I want to address the schedules. ... Commuting is part of that, isn't it?

Yes, and it's one of the reasons why we called for a very serious study and why House bill 3371 has [as] one of its key provisions to call for a study of commuting and to see what kind of impact it does have on fatigue. We strongly support that study. We want to participate in that study.

What if they say it's bad and the commuting has got to stop? How are they going to hire pilots to live in New York? You might have to pay them some more money.

Whatever that study shows, whatever that congressional study shows, that will give us a road map for the proper answer to this question. That's probably the big issue, why we have this now. There has never been a study about it. ...