Wages will never rise with inflation. It’s a feature, not a bug

Well, they do in a free market environment. Airline people are artificially locked to their employer (seniority system) so it's possible for us not to benefit from market forces under certain conditions.

Example, economy is hot, inflation and wages are up but you typically have to change jobs to enjoy the full benefit of market-driven wage inflation. Pilots don't do that, except at specific career points. Also if there's not a lot of retirements, then there may not be excess demand relative to the available applicant pool. Even if there IS a labor shortage, that doesn't naturally drive up wages for everybody ELSE on the list... we saw this 2017-2019, airlines wanted to increase the bottom of the FO scale but unions naturally wanted across the board increases.

Airlines want to pay junior FO's what they need to keep the applicants coming; everybody else on the list they want to pay as little as possible.

Market forces can have a slight effect on the upper scale during amenable periods... if their peer airlines have a higher scale, managers know that mediators are more likely to release a union for self-help so if somebody is behind the pack they have that incentive.

I don't know why people keep repeating this lie... the 1500 hour rule was not about safety it was about Obama's gift to the unions.

I don't think it's a lie, I actually like it.

The only way to assure X level of safety at Y number of hours is to run rigorous national aviation academies with rigid standards and low very tolerance for deviation from standards, ie just like military flight school. And recurrent would be a real biatch.

But since that's not happening, flight hours (ie experience) do have a rough correlation to safety and that's well documented. Of course there's a lot of variables and inconsistencies (1500 hours pipeline or drop zone =/= 1500 fighter hours) but it's close enough for government work.

And I like my union, if they pulled off the 1500 hour rule over the objection A4A and RAA, more power to them. But really I think the colgan familes had more to do with pushing it over the top than anything else... hard to argue that profit DEPENDS on a certain number of pax fatalities with them in the room, have to pull your punches at the very least.

Exactly! If you want extraordinarily safe air travel and solid wages for pilots, the 1500 hr rule is great. It increases safety by assuring that every pilot in the cockpit has enough experience to be able to recognize and defuse a dangerous situation (at least in theory). It also raises the barriers to entry into the career field high enough that there will never be a glut of pilots, which protects wages.

So if you want a long, lucrative career that won’t kill you, this is a good thing.

The big if is IF a central organization gets behind mass production of flight hours. 250,000 hours/year isn’t at all unreasonable. In that situation you build 4 parallel runways somewhere sunny with a bunch of solar panels and you order 100 new e-trainers and you can fly for $25/hr marginal cost

Except this argument doesn't hold water, the 1500 hour rule had nothing to do with safety since the Colgan FO had more than 1500 hours.

The other side of that is that now regionals are so desperate to hire pilots they will hire anyone with 1500 hours who can fog a mirror. It actually makes us LESS safe because now pilots who they probably wouldn't have hired in the past are now being hired.

No, they would have hired them anyway. Just with 190 hours instead of 1500.

1500 hours won't fix everybody, but it will make a lot of pilots more cognizant of their own mortality.

This is libertarian nonsense that ignores the reality of power dynamics in employment.

:rolleyes: And what is your choice of economic theory?

foul on the play. Tu quoque fallacy

In other words, you like to point out problems, but lack the ability or will to solve them

I don’t think you have to discuss your own entire, nuanced economic viewpoint as a prerequisite to point out an error in someone else’s statement, no. I believe we can discuss people’s statements without irrelevant information.


the power imbalance between employer and employee keeps wages from rising with inflation in a “free market.” Whether I’m a communist, neoliberal, or paleoanarchist is irrelevant to that statement.

is this your first encounter with this poster?

oh, would you like to jump in an explain how my economic viewpoint is relevant to my assertion that libertarianism ignores the power dynamics of employer vs employee?

First time I’ve bothered to engage. Oh well, we all make mistakes.

I didn't say it shouldn't be regulated.

The problem with anything other than free market is that *somebody* has to be in charge... and that somebody will eventually evade all checks, balances, and accountability. Historical examples abound.

The 1500 hour rule had more to do with appeasing the Colgan crash family members and pretentiously “outraged” politicians. I am in favor of it, however as a check airman during that era and later, I can tell you emphatically the low time graduates of professional training organizations were way more competent than the middle-aged life changers with 1500 hours of $100 hamburgers. The increase of average IOE from 25 hours to 60-80 is evidence. The regional flying environment is not safer overall with a mere minimum hours requirement.

I didn’t say you said it shouldn’t be regulated.

what I said was: the assertion that wages rise to keep up with inflation in a free market is libertarian claptrap, and not true.

It was enacted during the Obama administration, but was an FAA regulation in the works for years prior under pressure from Congress. Being an FAA reg, I didn’t require his signature.

I never said otherwise.

Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses!

here’s how it went:

and that is completely untrue.

We hired pilots with 1500 hours that we turned down at 500, but now with an extra 1000 hours of reinforcing bad habits. The training footprint and performance records support that.

I believe in higher mins, the challenge is to attract quality, motivated pilots in the industry, and that will mean some kind of affordable pathway.

Semantics, I never implied that I was talking about a theoretical libertian free market, no such thing exists at the marco scale in the world today, and everybody knows what I meant.

in a libertarian fantasy free market, or any other you wish to define, wages won’t keep up with inflation.

the idea that they will is borne of libertarian claptrap, whether you advocate for a libertarian free market or not.

Nobody said it was perfect, and it costs money to do better. The regionals squeaked through the last growth spurt without any fatalities (well OK one in AK, but they have different rules in practice if not in theory). So everything is hunky-dory, no action required. No blood, no sense of urgency.

Wasn’t the era of regionals hiring at 250-500 hours pretty short lived and also not every regional was doing that?

Regardless, the 1500 hour rule has seemed to provide a weird mix of positives and negatives. Pay improved drastically but the crunch on labor availability it caused has also meant that quality of applicants has not necessarily gone up.

Prior to about the turn of the century competitive mins were always around 1000-2500TT / 300-500 ME. Than came the RJ boom, and even then some regionals stuck to 1000 minimum.

Well it fixed one problem but didn't fix other problems... the regionals would still be hiring low quality applicants without the ATP rule, they'd just have fewer hours. All applicants improve at least a little between 200 and 1500 hours, and most gain significant improvement, in judgement if nothing else.

1). Has anyone seen updated tables of retirements with the early outs of covid accounted for? I'm seeing a 20000 over 5 yrs number thrown around.

2). are any regionals struggling for applicants yet? In other words the covid induced glut has been cleared out.

I'm just not convinced it will ever reach crisis levels. It's a damn good job (for the right type of person) and airline funded training is an actionable cost effective measure if necessary, and can be implemented gradually as needed. I've got 1000 TPIC and phone is dead silent. Until my peers at the 3-6 year experience level in 121 start moving on in significant numbers I'm not losing any sleep over it and I'm guessing recruiting teams aren't either.

Sounds a little high for the US, but maybe in the ballpark


Yeah they can scale it up or down as needed, and we started to see a little of that pre-covid, B6 and UAL I think had very limited sponsored training programs?

One thing they don't like about doing that is they commit a lot of money to unknown, and typically very young, candidates. They might be able to guesstimate who will make a good technical pilot by testing but it's harder to guess who will make a good employee and represent the company well that early in your life/career. Guess they can always gamble and reserve the right to not employ you in the end, although flows baked into regional union contracts seem to be trending more towards guaranteed employment.

Keep your apps updated, keep pushing, you never know what might trigger their interest and 1000 TPIC makes you worthy of consideration by all.

I’m right there with you. Plenty of TPIC, LCA, M.S. degree, extensive volunteer work and I too have not had any luck. My friends without these things have recently heard from United though so there’s hope for some out there.

OOfff is an appropriate screen name since you inappropriately attributed the Tu Quoque fallacy...

That's depressing! You've definitely got a leg up on me, but needless to say we're both somewhere in that pile of apps, and hopefully not misplaced

the machine is running again but not full speed. Lotta cjo’s to clear And they cannot call everyone instantaneously

And in some cases the machines are sputtering pretty badly having early retired many of their training cadre and drastically driven up the training requirement by retiring some of their older and more junior aircraft fleet types.

Given that one of the stated purposes of the PSP was to keep people qualified, that’s disappointing. Of course liberal leaves are cheaper than paying for displacement moves, up front anyway...

Just as one data point. AA is still trying to requal. furloughed pilots. In MIA there are 100 FO on reserve for the 737. 50 of them cannot be used, they are waiting for their requal.

The rest are flying like crazy.

Yes, and Facebook bought REI’s building.Your point is like saying McDonalds bought the burger shop down the street.

REI is going to suffer because of this. There's a very good reason that people were working in centralized offices before the pandemic. So-called "infrastructure" was there before the pandemic in the form of virtual meeting spaces. They were used for extremely specific purposes, but cannot replace real face-to-face meetings.

Corporations weren't just sending people on business trips on airlines to waste money, they were doing it because it was more profitable in the long run to send people to physical locations. And no, the "infrastructure" has not evolved over the last year. Until you can physically reach out and shake hands with someone over the internet, it will not replace or even make a dent in business travel long term.

Any corporation that says they are doing away with business travel is either virtue signalling or making very poor future financial decisions based on an unprecedented economic recession.