chi05

With all the flying that has been outsourced to the regionals and now talk of international code sharing and cabotage, the U.S. pax carriers might not be a better career choice. Anyone in their twenties who gets hired at FDX in the next few years will still retire very senior.

MaydayMark

Ask anybody that git hired by pax carriers in the past 20 years if they think they got a good deal?

80ktsClamp

There's no way to tell whether or not this is a valid statement until that person retires.

The regionals are being pared down, but there's the threat of cabotage (of course the freighters won't be immune to this) that is ever looming.

The only thing for sure is that 99.99% of us will not predict correctly where the industry will be in 35-40 years. And that .01% that did have no clue whether or not they actually got it right until that time comes.

bliddel

The future of travel will depend almost entirely on the cost feasibility of various energy sources. I don't expect to see practical electric airplanes (or solar, or wind). Trains do have an enormous energy efficiency advantage. Governments, in their zeal to "stop global warming" may turn flight into a passing fad.

ccb2000

Like it or not folks, drones are on their way. The first commair industry to succumb will be freight. Drones are a financial win for company's bottom line. To say that it won't happen is blind ignorance. I think 10 years from now, it will be starting to happen. The folks in Edwards AFB already have a drone that can take-off, fly an international route, aerial refuel, and RTB completely autonomously. The FAA is going to have experimental drone routes in the US airspace within the next 2 years. And yes, Google has cars that drive completely on their own. I see them every week on hwy 101.

We are probably the last generation of pilots as we know it. Let's just hope we will make it through a career of it before tech makes us obsolete.

MaydayMark

Your career will go much smoother with that attitude ...

Rock

Funny, I have yet to see unmanned freight trains or container ships. And which drone are you talking about that can refuel "completely autonomously"?
Drones and robots have great application in high risk combat zones. But their attrition rate is high for a variety of reasons. Much higher than the attrition rate of manned vehicles. That's an acceptable risk in an environment where things are blowing up all over the place. Not so acceptable in your average peacetime environment. Also, unlike a lot of military applications, pilots in civilian cargo aircraft are not a limiting factor on mission accomplishment. FedEx doesn't need to have its aircraft loiter at high altitudes for days at a time, fly halfway across the world and back without landing, or pull 15Gs to defeat a SAM threat. It just needs a couple relatively cheap monkeys in the cockpit to make realtime decisions in the somewhat dynamic environment of international airspace.
Until shipping companies are willing to pull engineers from trains running on a track, or crews from ships sailing at slow speeds across wide open oceans, don't expect that they will be too eager to pull pilots from cockpits.

FDXLAG

I saw Iron Man 3. it will be much sooner than that.

Huck

Edwards doesn't have to turn a profit.

mayutt

I think Rock makes a good point. Military drones save money because they can outlast stomachs, rear-ends and bladders. ISR and light attack can be performed in something that is small, light and cheap to fly compared to a strike fighter. As previously indicated they're also cheap to crash. The USAF still pays some Officer to drive the thing from a ground based station somewhere.

So, if the expense in hauling freight is in operating a craft large enough to haul the payload, would drones really save money in the freight industry? They're still going to need operators on the ground somewhere (maybe one operator could drive a couple or more at once, I suppose) but it seems to me the savings from eliminating crews would be in the noise and likely not a worthwhile trade-off (safety or bottom-line wise) of having on-board, real-time judgment. Even compared to autonomous drones, hourly pilot pay seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the operating expense of something the size of a 777.

Thoughts?