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.