Originally Posted by forgot to bid

The thing about profit sharing that bothers me is it reminds me of a sales job where you go out and pitch a product the customer orders with the company and then the company tells you how much they ordered and here is your commission.

That little part about how many orders I made is really up to the company and in la la land. Now I think our profit sharing is on more firm ground than that but I'll never trust it.

If you want to go outside the box, when I was a corporate pilot I was also a sales guy. I managed what charters we did and ran the risk of achieving my goal was to get about 30 hours a month or blowing it by turning down bad trips. I was paid a nice base salary and then a per hour 'commission' off the hours I flew in which the boss made money. The boss was no idiot, he was an immigrant with a 6th grade education now worth about a half a billion dollars. He understood how to motivate people and by tying my income to his, we were on the same page- just like any other sales job. The current system industry wide doesn't put the employee and employer on the same page.

I don't advocate changing an established system but if you told a 5th year pilot (any plane) he'll make $50,000 a year base salary and $.35 per available seat per hour then it'd work out like this:

5th year = $50,000. Then MD88 pilot flies 150 passengers. 150pax x $0.35 = $52.5/flight hour. Pilot flies 70 hours a month (840 in a year). So $50,000 + $52.5 x 840 = $94,100.

$94,100 equals $112.02/flt hr, but currently 5th year 88 FO is $92.57.

Now what happens when times our bad, shrink hours available and pilot costs decrease. If things are bad then you're stuck furloughing.

What about reserve pilots, they get $X per day that they're available whether used or not or the higher of the flight hours flown.

If the company is doing well, surcharges per hour.

That'd be a system flexible to the business environment. Not what we have now. But that's just what I've done and seen not what's practical given the dinosaur nature of our industry today.