Then they'll go and buy a 5 dollar In Touch magazine and spend another 7 dollars on starbucks without blinking an eye.

 

The supply of experienced pilots was low. There were plenty of less experienced pilots who never had a chance earlier in the hiring boom that were willing to work for lower wages.

If the bar were raised (i.e. supply limited) then fewer pilots would be available who met the higher standards.

 

You're not kidding. They can top if off by going to the Wall Street Deli where a sandwich, smallish drink and chips are $11.87.

 

The only way we will ever make any real headway as pilots is if the airlines can't find people to work. And the only way to make that happen would be to uproot the current longevity system as it exists. It would be a drastic change, and for that reason I doubt we'll see it happen any time soon, but...

I would suggest hiring pilots into a contract for their specific seat at a given pay rate. I would then tie that pay rate to the CPI and add something like a 4-5% annual increment to it. This would eliminate probationary year pay and force airlines to offer a reasonable wage at the first year. It would effectively allow pilots to jump around between airlines and therefore increase pay competition.

Things start to get messy, however, when you talk about moving to new aircraft and switching seats. Perhaps moving to a larger type would guarantee an add-on to your wage, but I think the rates for different aircraft would have to be a bit tighter than they are now. It would be reasonable to think most airlines could get away with just a narrowbody and widebody rate for each seat. Then, say if you were a narrowbody FO at Delta and American had a better narrowbody or widebody FO rate, you would just leave (assuming they would hire you). The same would be held true for captains. Upgrade would basically be dictated by the combination of pilot experience and what the airline is offering for pay. One wouldn't have to worry about being hired at the right time and place to find the quickest path to the left seat.

Obviously there would be several other effects if a system like this were in place. The ultimate goal being to get airlines to compete for your labor. I would hope the competition would force airlines to guarantee more days off (a la SWA), but I suppose your schedule would still have to be seniority/longevity based. Additionally, airlines would have incentive to make your package more attractive over time as every time someone leaves for another airline, they have to train a new person.

Just a pipe dream, but food for thought I guess...

 

Bet that system would be fun during the typical 10 year downturn. Talk about unintended consequences. Non starter and a half.

 

What makes you think if the bar was raised, that others wouldn't do the same as you and work harder to meet those standards?

I'm still curious as to how many hours you had when you hit 300 instrument?

 

I still am looking for an answer on this. Why should a Skywest, ASA, XJT, American Eagle, Comair, RAH, Colgan, Mesa, etc. who all pay less than $25/hr for new hires, why should these new hires be paid anymore than that?

Why should a Continental new hire on the 767 be paid more than the current $31/hr?

 

I don't remember where I found this older article but it goes along with the thread, and is eye opening as far as the #'s go. Captain Icarus?

"Beware, dear son of my heart, lest in thy new-found power thou seekest even the gates of Olympus...These wings may bring thy freedom but may also come thy death." These words of wisdom were purportedly spoken by Daedalus to his son Icarus upon signing him off for his first solo flight on his new wings of wax and feathers. Unfortunately, like many young aviators, Icarus made a hubristic decision. He wantonly exceeded the operating limitations of his aircraft and thereby sealed his fate. We know of him today only because his fatal accident was recorded in the annals of the MTSB-Mythological Transportation Safety Board.

I remembered this ancient story of Icarus the other day when a former airline pilot of the WW II generation was expounding on his belief that modern-day airline pilots are nothing but a gaggle of prima donnas and spoiled brats. He was a call-in listener on a radio-talk show that I was appearing on in conjunction with the publication of our new book False Security: The Real Story About Airline Safety. My wife (who is also a professional pilot) and I wrote the book to alert the traveling public to the many hidden threats to their safety that today's airline managers are subjecting them to in pursuit of their own agendas.

This venerable pilot's contention was that the recent fall from the great heights of big paychecks, comfortable retirement plans and cushy jobs suffered by today's airline pilots was really their own fault. They had reached too high with their 30%+ pay increases of 2001. Now their paychecks have been cut almost in half and their retirement plans have been decimated. The retired pilot said that he believed that today's professional aviators have entered an Icarus-type graveyard spiral from which the profession will never recover.

"Could this really be true?" I wondered. "Is it possible that airline pilots have begun a rapid descent to a status in our society that offers relatively little reward for the costs, risks and sacrifices that are required to master and carry on in the profession?"

After the radio interview, I found that I could not put his dire prediction behind me. I continued to mull it over until I came to the conclusion that I would look into this important question in more detail. I wanted to find out if the airline-piloting profession is really among the good-deal careers in this country-like family doctoring and the law-that are fast becoming unattractive to young people and current practitioners alike.

I began my investigation by going back over my memories of what the profession was like before deregulation of the airline industry. I say "memories" because I was there both before and after Alfred Kahn and his band of merry bean counters and bureaucrats managed to really screw up the airline industry with passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978.

I began flying for United Airlines in 1968 and counted myself among those gilded birdmen until I left United in 1990 to pursue other aviation adventures. My airline-pilot career therefore spanned the ten years before deregulation through the decade following its implementation.

I also realized that I had a unique perspective on the transition period of the early 1980s because I had been an insider during several of the pivotal events of that time-the crew-complement fight, the first major-airline concessionary pilot contract, B Scales, the United Airlines pilots' strike of 1985 and many others. During those tumultuous years, I worked for both the company and the pilots' union in various capacities that involved making sense of what was happening and communicating the truth to the pilot group at United.

Initially, my thoughts drifted back to the "good old days". As I recall, they truly were just that. In the decade I flew for United before deregulation, we enjoyed very high pay and an incredible amount of time off compared with the other professionals of the day. We seldom worked more than three or four days a week and often had more than a week off between trips. If we flew forty hard hours in a month, we complained about being overworked. Other than during an occasional schedule meltdown due to weather, our duty days were reasonable and not overly fatiguing. Most of our layovers were long enough to provide a restful and rejuvenating break. As I remember it, we all thoroughly enjoyed our work. And to top it all off, my retirement-plan projections in the late 1970s showed that my annual retirement pay would exceed my retirement-year paycheck by a considerable amount.

A closer look at our compensation levels in the pre-deregulated airline industry will illustrate what I mean. When I checked out as a Boeing 737 first officer in 1978, I grossed over $70,000 a year. As I recall, Boeing 737 captains were pulling down around $100,000 a year and those exalted Boeing 747 captains were making in the neighborhood of $175,000. We used to facetiously ask the question, "Why did Boeing put such a huge hump on the top of the 747?" The not-so-facetious answer was, "So the captain can sit on his wallet."

Now, you may say that those pay rates are about what modern-day airline pilots were making before the last round of pay cuts. However, you have to convert that 1978 pay to today's dollars. To do that, we need to apply the increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

The CPI is a measure of the average change in prices over time in a market basket of goods and services. For example, the beer I bought in 1978 for $1.00 (and as I recall, I bought more than a few) costs me $2.82 now (Thankfully, I'm not drinking as much beer as I used to.). Table 1 below shows the 1978 paychecks for each position and the related size of those paychecks in today's dollars.




TABLE 1: 2003 $ value of 1978 Pay



Year
B737 FO B737 Cap B747 Cap



1978
$70,000 $100,000 $175,000



2003
$197,400 $282,000 $493,500





Clearly, even before the current pay cuts are factored in, modern airline pilots are not making anywhere near what they were before deregulation if you're looking at their compensation in "constant dollars". That news is bad enough, but there is another factor that we need to look at if we're going to get a properly focused view of airline-pilot pay.

From around the late 1940s through the end of the era of the Civil Aeronautics Board's (CAB) economic regulation of the airline industry in 1978, U.S. airline pilots enjoyed pay raises of around 15% each time their contracts came up for renewal (typically every two years). This was accomplished through use of a strategy dubbed "industry standard plus". In other words, when airline-pilot groups negotiated new contracts, they typically sought and got an across-the-board pay raise of industry standard plus 5%. Since the pilot groups to which they compared their then-current pay were making around 10% more than the group in negotiations (because these other pilots had used the same strategy in their last contract negotiations), industry standard plus 5% usually resulted in a 15% pay increase. And this happened every two years.

Table 2 below shows the 1978 paychecks for each position and the related size of those paychecks in two-year increments with a 15% pay increase applied. We can see from this table that today's airline pilots are not making anywhere near what they might be if the industry had not been deregulated.

TABLE 2: 15% Pay Increase Every 2 Years
Year
B737 FO B737 Cap B747 Cap
1978
$70,000 $100,000 $175,000
1980
$80,500 $115,000 $201,250
1982
$92,575 $132,250 $231,438
1984
$106,461 $152,088 $266,153
1986
$122,430 $174,901 $306,076
1988
$140,795 $201,136 $351,988
1990
$161,914 $231,306 $404,786
1992
$186,201 $266,002 $465,503
1994
$214,132 $305,902 $535,329
1996
$246,251 $351,788 $615,628
1998
$283,189 $404,556 $707,973
2000
$325,667 $465,239 $814,168
2002
$374,518 $535,025 $936,294


One may argue, and I'm sure my fellow former airline pilot on the radio-talk show would, that the very attractive paychecks on the bottom line would not be sustainable in today's world of cheapest tickets and airline managements' obsession with cutting airline-pilot pay to the bone. Let's take a closer look at that argument.

By my calculations, airline-pilot pay would be about five times higher today if pre-deregulation pay increases of 15% every two years had held sway since 1978. I estimate that average airline-pilot pay was around $100,000 per year before the latest pay cuts. If we multiply this average by the approximately 100,000 airline pilots on the airlines' seniority lists, we come up with a total U.S. airline-pilot payroll of $10,000,000,000.

Now, let's increase that payroll by five times to bring it up to where it should be. The result is of course $50,000,000,000. How are we going to cover this $40,000,000,000 pay increase

Well, if we divide $40,000,000,000 by the number of airline tickets sold each year in the U.S (670,000,000), we see that the average price of a ticket would increase by approximately $60. I submit that if this price increase had been applied gradually over the course of the past twenty-five years, the traveling public would not have even noticed it. In fact, I believe that you could raise the average ticket price tomorrow by $60 and air travelers would not take note of it. How would they even know, given the airlines' penchant for mystery pricing? If the increase was applied across the board, then airline managers would not be able to use their now timeworn lament about competitive disadvantages.

 

I hope they do. It will improve the profession as a whole if more pilots work to reach higher standards. Keep raising the bar until fewer pilots make it over. That's one way of impacting the supply side of the supply/demand curve. Newcomers will look at how hard it is to get into the profession and some won't even start down the path.

 

Several thousand. I'm too lazy to go back through the logbooks for an exact number.