Originally Posted by
sailingfun
I think Lorenzo paid one salary for CA and one for FO. Did not matter what aircraft. That has since evolved to 3 different categories if I recall.
One thing to keep in mind is that with a one pay fits all system LOS pay is normally moved to 25 or 30 years max. Quite different from the 12 years we have now. In addition you lose the ability to generate pay raises via new equipment. Part of this thread is about the 737-800 paying more then the Maddog. The reason is we were able to get higher rates because of the greater efficiencies of the airframe. Lots of new aircraft types will be coming online in the next 30 years.It would be a major mistake to give that up.
If you look at the evolution of aviation from its' infancy, the trend has always been towards larger aircraft (on average). It only makes sense that, as populations grow, any given route could be economically served by larger and larger aircraft. Of course we had the distasteful attempt to fight evolution with the 50-seat RJ, but believing in those was really more of an act of misplaced faith than anything else... which almost killed our airline.
Now that a modicum of sanity and intelligence has returned to our fleet planning, we're going back to larger, more efficient airplanes (imagine that). So I agree with sailing: we need to keep the pay structure that lets us capitalize on size.