New York Times Regional Pilot article
 

On the front page of the website.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/ny...t.html?_r=1&hp

The best and most truthful article I've seen from the WSJ.

"NEW YORK TIMES" :D

I am shocked to see this from the New York times though. They twist everything

Not bad.....Hope the pilot that dropped his name and carrier doesn't get the axe.

holy crap I've seen that guy around the crew room lol

A very truthful and accurate article. That's always good to see.

No offense on Mr. Lapointe but, that sure isn't a regional pilot's house behind him! He's got to be at the folks'.:D

I really don't expect all of this to create some great change in our industry, but if nothing else I hope those who are wannabe airline pilots pay close attention to the realities of the industry. Maybe just maybe people will think twice before dropping $100,000 on a zero to hero program or paying for a job at gulfstream. There is no longer a return on investment in today's 121 world.

It's not just Gulfstream that charges outrageous fees. Although at UND and ERAU you at least get a 4 year degree. We've had many people in our class who had school debt in the upwards of $120,000 from ERAU, and UND for their 4 year degree with all their flight training including their CRJ training. One guy had $140,000 school debt. When he told one of our instructors, our instructor shook his head in disbelief.

Amen. If there's anybody wondering about the regionals, it might seem selfish for us that are already in it to discourage new guys but it's just reality. It's not glamorous by any means, it's just a job that more and more does not return on the sacrifice that one makes.

Those guys from the avia colleges are hopeless cases. They've had the SJS for a long time enough to go 100k+ in the hole. They will have to find a job, any job to justify their costs and get some kind of return on their investment. Hopefully this will reach out to the others out there, second career cases as well, at least to avoid the regionals untill pay and QOL goes above poverty rates.

I am not defending UND or ERAU. Although you receive a four year degree, which I am a big advocate for, I would never recommend any one major in aviation or go to predominately aviation related colleges.

I agree. Why get a degree you can't really use unless you intend to become airline management. Even then a BS in Business or Finance followed with an MBA in Business management will serve you better.

This is not the profession it once was when our fathers were flying. Back then, Airline Pilots were respected and thought of as well to do individuals. Pay was excellent and loads of time off to do what you want to do on the side. Now, airline pilots are just bus drivers. Even the aircraft being produced by Airbus is called just that.

Americans are rather thick to the concept of opportunity cost. It's an entitlement complex really. The problem is that we've degraded the labor market to the point where all that is required to sit on the right seat of a passenger carrying airplane is a good credit score. I am hopeful the constriction of credit will accelerate and further reduce the available debt the majority of people rely on for the purposes of going zero to hero to the cockpit of a commercial outfit. This is happening with undergraduate college degrees as well, aviation grads are just one corollary of the problem. The loan hose has to be cut off.

People don't police themselves, so by denying the vehicles under which they indulge their 'dreams' you can indirectly positively effect the issue of livable wages and working conditions that the industry is currently on a flat spin to the bottom.

It is unfair? Sure. Just like a regulated industry was 'unfair' by maintaining barriers to entry and keeping wages competitive at the expense of less people getting a 'shot' at being airline pilots. Life's tough, not everybody needs to be an airline pilot to satisfy their passion for flying. I much rather see a push to make GA affordable and thence provide people the ability to have a recreational outlet with which to satisfy their affection for flying that doesn't involve disregarding economic common sense for what "feels right". Those two at colgan were so behind the jet it's not even funny (they had no business behind that yoke) and if you don't think the underlying labor dynamics of the regional game are not the underpinnings of the reason those two were in the cockpit to begin with you're probably thick to the concept of optimism bias or saddled with 6 figures of debt on a job with a negative cashflow after cost of living yourself...

The dream is dead, people need to start claiming some responsibility for their economic fates. The difference between one whose passion is flying and one whose passion is nursing is pure timing and luck. One caught the short end of the stick while the other can gloat, for a little bit anyways. It's no excuse for going "see the problem, acknowledge the problem to others, aaaand choose to do it anyways...it's my passion though..."

I take it you're a rich boy who's parents paid for all of your training. Sorry some people who have dreamt of being pilots the whole life didn't have rich parents to pay for their training so loan companys have to. That loan is my loan, that I'm going to pay back. It's the only way I could get myself into aviation.

there is nothing wrong with taking loans out.... I am going to say I'm not a fan of the 90 day program pilots because I don't see how they know everything they need to know in 90 days. However at a college they at least get a better picture of aviation. Some people have to make it for themselves in this world, and want to attempt a career in aviation not starting at age 30 when they could afford it.

FTG

Nice article and pretty accurate (except for the United Connection, Delta Express).

I am happy to see the media now showing this is a regional airline problem, not just a Colgan problem

I suggest that you learn the true definition of opportunity cost and how it relates to business. You speak like you want to act like you understand business so I thought a little help might be good for you.

Well Said! I remember working 2 jobs to get my private! Diploma Mills=A.D.D. to the industry

I came from almost nothing and my parents definitely did not help me at all get any of my flight training. I did it piece by part 161 piece, working two jobs, living on "great value" mac and cheese, etc etc etc. Many of us have done it this way, without a loan. Some need a loan. To each their own. No need to berate someone with interesting points (thought perhaps a little callous) just because they didn't take a loan to pay for flight training.

I've had the kid on my jumpseat. Nice guy; Good for him !

update 2018 Hrs
The page is now coming up blank.... hummm.... even if you search it from the Times front page and click your way through... when you get there it's blank....
somethings afoot...

For some reason I hit the link and get a blank page.

The unions forced the article to be removed.

You can find it if you search for it. Buy a NYT tomorrow or something.

The Reality of a Pilot's Life Defies a Glamorous Stereotype

This article was reported by David M. Halbfinger, Matthew L. Wald and Christopher Drew, and written by Mr. Halbfinger.

Alex Lapointe, a 25-year-old co-pilot for a regional airline, says he routinely lifts off knowing he has gotten less sleep than he needs. And once or twice a week, he says, he sees the captain next to him struggling to stay alert.
Neil A. Weston, also 25, went $100,000 into debt to train for a co-pilot’s job that pays him $25,000 annually. He carries sandwiches in a cooler from his home in Dubuque, Iowa, bought his first uniform for $400, and holds out hope of tripling his salary by moving into the captain’s seat, then up to a major carrier. Assuming, that is, the majors start hiring again.
Capt. Paul Nietz, 58, who recently retired from a regional airline, said his schedule wore him down and cost him three marriages. His workweek typically began with a 2:30 a.m. wake-up in northern Michigan and a 6 a.m. flight to his Chicago home bases. There, he would wait for his first assignment, a noon departure.
By the time he parked his aircraft at the last gate of the night, he was exhausted. But he would be due back at work eight hours and 15 minutes later. “At the very most, if you’re the kind of person that could walk into a hotel room, strip and lay down, you might get four and a half hours of sleep,” he said. “And I was very senior. I was one of the fortunate guys.”
The National Transportation Safety Board’s inquiry into the Feb. 12 crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 outside Buffalo has highlighted the operations of the nation’s regional airlines, a sector of the aviation industry that has grown to account for half the country’s airline flights and a quarter of its passengers.
The details of that world have surprised many Americans — the strikingly low pay for new pilots; the rigors of flying multiple flights, at lower altitudes and thus often in worse weather than pilots on longer routes, while scrambling to get enough sleep; the relative inexperience of pilots at the smaller airlines, whose training standards are the same, but whose skills may not be.
In hearings last week in Washington, witnesses and safety officials raised questions of whether the crew of the plane that crashed, killing all 49 people on board and one on the ground, had been adequately vetted and whether they might have been hampered by, among other factors, fatigue.
But regardless of whether training, fatigue or the cost-cutting that has hit the entire industry are ultimately determined to have contributed to the crash of Flight 3407, interviews with current and former regional pilots make vividly clear the daily challenges they face.
Peek inside a crew lounge at midnight in Chicago, and one could easily find every recliner occupied by an off-duty aviator trying to sleep despite the whine of a janitor’s vacuum cleaner.
In any city with a sizable air hub, a search of Craigslist for the term “crash pad” will turn up listings for rooms for rent, often for $200 a month or less, a short drive from an airport, where a dozen or more pilots, unable to afford hotels, may come and go, barely letting the mattresses cool.
But many regional pilots, paid entry-level wages that are sometimes no better than a job at McDonald’s, can not afford even a crash pad.
“I know a guy who bought a car that barely ran and parked it in the employee lot at his base airport, and slept in his car six or seven times a month,” said Frank R. Graham Jr., a former regional pilot and airline safety director who runs a safety consulting firm in Charlotte, N.C. Pilots for some regional airlines have been known to sleep in the aisles of their planes.
Like the two Flight 3407 pilots, who caught free rides on planes from Florida and Seattle to their flight from Newark to Buffalo, pilots at regional airlines routinely hopscotch across thousands of miles to get to work. Some live with their parents, as the plane’s first officer, Rebecca L. Shaw, did. Others, like Mr. Lapointe, live near former bases of operations that were shut down because an employer went out of business or a route was dropped.
Mr. Lapointe lives in Wakefield, Mass., 15 minutes from his old base in Boston. Since November, he has had to get himself to Kennedy International Airport in New York.
For Captain Nietz, a 27-year veteran, the biggest indignity was flying hungry. Delays were so routine that he seldom left his plane all day long, even “to grab a biscuit.” With food service long discontinued, he said, the only bites to be had were “the occasional peanut — and the airlines charge the crews for bags of peanuts and cheese and crackers.”

The renewed worries over commuter planes come as passenger airlines, regional and mainline, have achieved unprecedented levels of safety. Passenger deaths per million flights are down by more than two-thirds in the last 10 years. The 49 people on board the Buffalo flight were the first in 30 months to die during a scheduled flight on a passenger carrier.

But of the six scheduled passenger flights that have crashed since Sept. 11, 2001, only one has been from a major carrier. Four, including the one in Buffalo, were commuter flights; a total of 133 people died on those flights. (The fifth, a 50-year-old seaplane in Miami, was in neither category.)
And one of the worries about commuter pilots, fatigue, is also a problem for the mainline carriers; in fact, in some operations, the big airlines are more vulnerable. They are now conducting flights of 16 hours, across more time zones than a pilot can be expected to adapt to.
Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, who is chairman of the subcommittee on aviation, said Thursday that the group would hold a series of hearings next month. He said he was “stunned” by the Buffalo crew’s lack of sleep and relative inexperience.
“We need to understand, is this an aberration, or are standards sufficiently lax or insufficient, or insufficiently enforced that we need to be concerned about a much broader set of issues?” he said.
There is nothing wrong with commuting cross-country to fly, said Roger Cohen, the president of the Regional Airline Association, a trade group; after all, he pointed out, Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the US Airways pilot who ditched his crippled Airbus A320 in the Hudson River on Jan. 15, lives in Danville, Calif., and is based in Charlotte, N.C.
Mr. Cohen said he did not know what fraction of pilots commuted long distances to the city where they were, in airline parlance, “domiciled.”
“Anywhere from 50 to 70 percent, pick a number,” he said. But he said he did not think that number differed much between regional carriers and mainline carriers.
The Federal Aviation Administration, while it enforces one set of safety standards, says it does not know how the safety of the commuter airlines compares to the safety of the big carriers. It is working on that question because of the planned Senate hearings.
To the extent that Senator Dorgan’s hearings address pilot fatigue, they will not be the first such effort. In 1995, under pressure from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Air Line Pilots Association, the F.A.A. proposed shortening pilots’ workdays and redefining duty hours to include the time spent getting from plane to hotel and back.
But the airlines, which deny that pilot fatigue is a significant problem, opposed the changes, and the agency eventually backed off.
Patrick Smith, an airline pilot and aviation writer who spent years at a regional carrier, acknowledged that fatigue is a murky problem, with many causes and varying effects on different pilots, that is difficult to nail down as the main cause of an accident.
“But the fact that you can’t make this easy and direct link isn’t reason to ignore the problem,” he said. “Obviously it’s there.”
For Mr. Weston, the 25-year-old pilot from Dubuque, life in the regional air business is a little like being an extra in a movie. The planes he flies some days are labeled United Connection, others Delta Express. But his employer is an airline few people have ever heard of: Republic.
It is a quick hop by air but a six-hour drive from home to his base in Indianapolis, where he stays overnight with an aunt before starting his four-day workweek. His workdays run 12 hours, sometimes 16, far from home.
He said this really was a dream job for him and many of his fellow pilots, even though some have to hold down second jobs.
Asked if he flew for pleasure, he laughed.

For every prospective pilot that reads that story two other will read the adds from the flight schools and sign up.

As the story points out it's not a career its an illusion of a lifestyle that seems to no longer exist.

From what I understand he rents the first floor.... :D

Still works for me.....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/ny...t.html?_r=2&hp

Not a lawyer or anything, but not sure if it was smart for these guys to contribute themselves or their company to this article. I'm sure their PR dept. is not happy

I agree, and in a lot of cases, the airlines have a no talky to the press policy in there GOMs. The ones that dont, expect a GOM revision soon.

I know a lot have a no representation language, but Id like to think as long as you don't mention an affiliation with a company, or union and your talking in broad industry terms, whats the problem? What these guys do on their own time is their business.

The media can report on "condition of anonymity" when speaking on everything from leaked CIA files to what the current presidential administration plans on doing to screw over China because "the source was told not to speak on the matter due to the sensitivity of the subject" yet for some reason these guys couldn't do it here?

What ever happened to the Mesa guys when they did that news story about rest issues?

I thought the article was pretty good. Overall it certainly showed a slice of the worst of regional flying.... the one thing I didnt like was that the article left the impression that EVERY overnight was an 8+15 ordeal for regional pilots.... in 3 1/2 years of regional flying I did more than my share of reduced rest overnights... but they certainly were not the norm.

I am also not sure if I was currently flying for a regional that I would step out and make comments like that unless I was a union rep.

If you work for a company like that you probably should know what you are getting into. If I wouldn't be allowed to speak freely they are obviously worried about something.
The pilots I work with can speak to whoever about whatever part of the company they want.

Flying has become masstransportation, highly automated. Why pay more then a busdriver?

• Take commuting away, and how many of you would still be flying?
• ATP and First Class Medical with very few restrictions, how many of you would still be flying?
• Knowing what you know now before you signed up to become a pilot, how many of you would still be flying?
• Adjust hiring for a regional to require 2 years of unscheduled Part 135 in the Midwest, how many of you would still be flying?

I wish all of you the best, but take a reality check:eek:

1. I would
2. I would
3. I would
4. Again, I would.

Or unless it really sucked as bad as the article says.

Agreed, and if you highlight all the 12+ hour overnights and 2 leg days, where would that get us?

Oh I agree, but lets not pretend that every overnight we do is 8 hours... and every day we fly is 12-16 hours on duty. Some yes... too many...probably... everyday... not in my experience.

Is there room for the regs to be changed.....absolutely.

So what you're saying is any airline that requires their pilots to not talk to the media is a shady airline that has something to hide? :confused: That's ridiculous. Every company has someone who is designated to handle the media. Ya know, public relations?

As for the rest, the NTSB can stomp & scream all they want about "no commuting" & anything else for that matter. Until the FAA listens, the NTSB is wasting their breath. And even if they did want to disallow commuting there would be so many lawsuits it would take forever. Nothing will come of any of this except maybe new rest rules. Sadly, it will soon be forgotten and things will continue like they are now.

How many times after a fatal accident have we heard that this & that needs to change & it needs to change now, & 5+ years later still no change? What came of the Comair LEX accident? Fatigue was clearly a factor. Have they changed rest rules yet?

No offense Sir, but perhaps you should take a reality check.

Why pay more than a bus driver? We usually have more lives on an airplane to be responsible for. Let's not forget about the cost of the airplane as well relative to the cost of a bus. Our training is much more intense than that of a bus driver's. I'm willing to bet that bus drivers aren't subjected to the regs pilots are. A lot more things can go wrong on a plane than a bus also. And if things do go wrong on a bus, they can always pull over. Pilot's don't have that option. I'd be willing to bet that 100% of people who don't drive buses or fly airplanes would find that it's much, much easier to learn how to drive a bus.

Bus drivers don't have Autopilots...Why should we be paid more?

I find it hilarious that there's more arguments of why we shouldn't be paid more. God pilots are retarded.

Regardless of what's being spewed by the media..or by congress...I DON'T CARE if the media starts telling the public that we have reduced rest overnights every night, it's the NEGATIVE publicity that's needed to make our CRAP lifestyles better. Pour it on thicker, and the results can only be better.

Is nothing ever good enough?... for god's sake..this is the best push in the "right" direction the regional airline industry has gotten in a LONG time, and as has been echoed several times "we should take this ball and run with it".