This was an observation from a CO passenger about why Southwest can pay their pilots so well and CO cries poor and claims they can't make money domestically.

Nobody is buying the huge bonuses and raises that UACO executives gave themselves.



1. WN is today the U.S. airline that enplanes the most domestic-bound passengers.

2. WN tends not to have a very deep network in smaller cities and this could explain why they do not have any regional affiliates. WN does serve a few smaller cities, such as GEG, BOI, RNO, ABQ, AMA, LBB, MAF, CRP, HRL, PFN, JAN, BHM, CHS, GSP, ORF, ISP, PVD, ALB, and MHT. Admittedly, with the possible exception of some of the Texan airports on this list, there are no really small airports here.

3. WN does do quick turns, but so does CO. In fact, CO's very high a/c utilization rate was adopted from WN.

In the end, the WN business model is definitely different from that of the legacy carriers, and while the fact that they do not serve a lot of smaller airports certainly means they do not need a regional affiliate, it still does not explain why they can be profitable and have the highest pilots' salaries in the business.

Obviously, many factors come into play, but one would have to imagine that when the 30 or so top executives at UaCo immediately give themselves raises so that their salaries and possible bonuses for 2010 alone would add up to nearly $60 million, an amount that could pay for the salaries of 2,500 first-year First Officers, something is not right.

Again, no one is saying that executives do not deserve to be paid more, nor that they shouldn't have performance-based bonuses, but it does send a pretty rotten message to the tend of thousands of employees of UaCo, since they have not received a single cent extra on their far more modest salaries.

Again, perhaps it demonstrates that pilots' pay is not the difference between red and black ink. __________________