Tell that to the families of Colgan flight 3407. Things work until they don’t…

You new here or something? He's been here for quite a while and he's always been that way. We need a good laugh from time to time.

that is after managements started using employee concessions to increase profitability. As they began stripping away pay and work rules, they were forced to hire continually decreasing total time applicants. When the job was worth having, it was always a much higher time and certificate than just a commercial with 250 TT, and more often than not was well above ATP mins.

Mesa has already expanded into ACMI and is now ruining that industry too.

Don’t raise the retirement age! Lower the hour requirement. I’ve had not issues with newbie pilots Speaking from experience as a TRI/TRE overseas on and off for 24 years. Pilots from foreign lands are issued frozen ATPL with some as low as 250 hours. The freeze is removed once 1,500 hours is reached and passing their LPC’s. Bottom line right seaters are captains in training. Their chance to learn and improve their craft is the guy/gal in the right seat. Can’t blame non instructing captains who are hired to be part of crew equipped with a ready to go out of the box.

two words…..
Air France

It was not the 4500 hours you toted and there weren't concession prior to 9-11. It dipped to 250, but never as high as you stated. Not even close. For a person who wasn't in the regionals during the 90s, you seem to speak as if it were gospel. You are flat out wrong.

UAL mainline was hiring dudes and dudettes in the late 80s with less than 1000hrs TT. Same in the late 60s.

100% agreed!

First off, wages will not go down, and with inflation, they have to increase just to keep the same buying power. Why would the unions let wages decrease? Your statement makes zero sense.
That accident had nothing to do with the total time of the pilots involved. This has been explained, please try and keep up.

Everyone has explained it to you as well but you can't quite get it through your head either.

Renslow was hired at Colgan with 618 total time. Ergo, the ATP rule would have precluded his being hired at Colgan. Had he been subjected to the ATP rule, he would have needed close to 900 more hours. He would have had many more opportunities to learn and command a smaller aircraft before commanding a transport category aircraft. Even if he resisted learning anything from CFI'ing those 900 hours, it would have provided more opportunity to stall in real life.
There's a lot you can learn in 1500 hours. And again, even if you don't learn, it provides a lot of chances for idiots to be selected out of this career. Or to self select themselves out of existence before they take 50 terrified passengers with them.

But I don't expect you to agree to any of this, because it's bad for your bottom line

I do think better FAA training record keeping and access would have done more. Just like the PF in Atlas crash, this individual had a long history of failures he managed to keep hidden from several employers. Being in a regional with training and checking events could weed these people out in a way that being a bad flight instructor or banner tower that manages to survive won't. Will they weed them out? I think that is the question...

I can name that tune in just one word…

Atlas!

Wages can go lower since bonuses can vanish if supply lines for pilots exceed the demand. You sure have a bone to pick about this issue. Either you just like to argue or you have great nostalgia for the food stamp days. No coincidence crap wages went away after mins went up.

You already showed everyone you don't understand basic economics, but you just went and doubled down on it. Thanks for proving my point!

Summary....if the massive retirements get reduced to ZERO for three years and the 1500 hour requirement gets reduced like you are advocating for, there will be more ATP holding "Pilots" than landscapers in a Home Depot parking lot......AND WAGES WILL GO DOWN.




Did you know you are responding to 2 different people? I never said those things. Make a different response.

Do you have a hard time keeping conversations straight in your head?

You are REALLY bad at math.
Except that the unions wouldn't let that happen. And even if the 1500 hour rule was lowered, and the retirement age were extended, that would only ease the problem, not solve it long term.

Correlation doesn't equal causation.Maybe, but it has never been substantiated with numbers. So it's nothing more than a thin justification used by politicians, bureaucrats, and union hacks.

This is like watching that guy crash his homebuilt rocketship trying to prove the Earth is flat.

When you aren't here providing comic relief to actual airline pilots does your job involve balloons, big floppy shoes, and a red nose?

Nah he’s likely a Boeing test pilot.

I was hired in early 2000 at Eagle. I had a recent ATP and 600 multi at the time and was bottom of the barrel in experience in my class. A few years later and we had very low time folks get hired.

The cycle does funny things.

I know a guy long retired from Northwest who was hired at his first airline before he even had an instrument rating.

That happened at multiple airlines (majors) around the 1960's. It was also a very different era from a safety perspective. Most of those noob also got to fly the panel for a while too, for whatever that's worth.

Yes that's the issue. For both colgan and Atlas the issue wasn't so much lack of info (there was some of that) but lack of willpower on the part of the airlines. IIRC for one motive or another the airlines pushed them through despite both previously documented and observed deficiencies.

He spent a lot of those 618 hours at GIA, so pay-to-play seat meat.

Very entrepreneurial of GIA... turned seat 0F into a revenue seat.

Hard agree. Low total time and low quality of hours

We had a bunch of thisev’63-‘66-ish hires ar EA. All over the lot—great to awful, mostly mediocre but could do the job if things went well. I had a A Hyd failure on a 727, cappy proud to be hired with Luscombe time. Didn’t go smoothly, let’s say that.

Agreed.

Even with boom time hiring, the reality is "great job, lousy career, terrible investment."

If unions can stop wage concessions, please explain why a widebody CA makes only 65% of the purchasing power they had in 1980? Please explain why regional pilots ended up on food stamps and public assistance after 20+ years of concessionary negotiating after deregulation? Oh, and if you look at wage charts alongside new hire experience level you’ll see that as they reduced pay, working conditions and benefits, they continually were forced to hire less and less qualified applicants. They drove people away from wanting to become pilots. They created their own pilot shortage.
point being, anybody thinking a union can prevent concessions over the long term hasn’t been paying attention. They pay what they have to to keep seats filled.

Reading this thread feels like (pre covid inflation) car dealerships where they added some made up Market adjustment price on top of the MSRP/Sticker price and then refused to even talk about Invoice or sticker price.
This sonic guy is not even in the ball park. He's started with an end result and continues to argue to that end, facts be damned.

Arguing with some folks is like wrestling with a pig in mud, eventually you realize that the pig just wants to get dirty.

So you're saying the unions are impotent?

You are probably comparing straight hourly wages without any consideration toward soft money generated by all the work rule changes. A widebody CA in 1980 earning 120,000 a year would need to make 420,000 a year now. That’s easily done at Delta and I suspect American and United. In fact at Delta that’s probably well below the average Widebody CA pay. It’s not difficult to crack 600,000 and some pilots have exceeded 900,000 in a year. If you compare it to 2019 when the current round of contracts got put on ice by covid we were solidly ahead of inflation.

For real? ? ?

i know you are a WB CA at DL and would know more about it than me, but I was under the impression WB CAs pulling more than 450-500k/year was a fluke related to the decision regarding staffing the A350 in 2018 and early 2019, not something that regularly happens.

Look at hourly rates and an average line value = what the avg pilot makes on any aircraft. Taking advantage of schedule manipulation, additional flying and green slips should never be conflated with book rates

I know lots of guys who broke 600K on the 330. Some quite junior. People forget all the times they get extra pay for reroute, DC excess, purchased trips, training, vacation, profit sharing and a overtime trip now and then. The pilots breaking 900k were because of the 350 issues.

Sounds dreamy, but how many of the 13,000ish pilots are in that situation?

BS flag raised.

No union can fully negate the effects of 9/11, bankruptcies, and/or inept management (can you relate?).

No, I know people doing it.

good points about using the contract and the soft money we can get. Yeah I figured the 900k was the 350 back in 2018/early 2019.

In early 2019 I met a 350 FO who told me he had cleared (either 550k or 600k I can’t remember right now, I think it was 600k, but not certain) in 2018, and the CA he just finished flying with was north of 1mil