Good article by Joe Sharkey on the NTSB hearing on the Colgan crash, at Joe Sharkey At Large - scroll down to May 13th.

Joe Sharkey was a passenger on the Embraer Legacy/GOL 737 midair in Brazil, and I believe he writes for the New York Times.

 

Its incredible the way they dance around these issues. They acknowledge indirectly that 16K is not enough to live on in the Newark area by the fact that management gets locality pay but not flight crews. Obviously they have every employees' address so they know who lives where and that most crews commute to EWR. The FAA has never been on the side of flight crews as far as fatigue is concerned. Granted Capt. Renslow and F/O Shaw were the only ones in that cockpit on that night, but I will submit that many of the factors that led up to this tragedy were enabled and allowed to happen by both Colgan and the FAA and it didn't have to happen.

 

Management gets locality pay because that is what it takes to get quality candidates to live there. Pilots don't because they will take the job at a 16k/yr salary and suffer outrageous work rules hoping to go to the majors.

My 2 observations. 1 - No one is forced into the aviation career field. 2 - Companies won't give their employees more money than they have to out of the goodness of their heart, unless that is the business of the company (i.e. Goodwill, etc).

 

I have a slightly different take on it.

Mgmt gets locality pay because they need a decent compensation package to attract high-quality candidates.
Flight crew gets crap pay because management doesn't see the need for high-quality candidates. They've pretty much convinced themselves that a monkey can fly a modern airliner. The fact that pilots are *willing* to work for bananas just confirms their suspicions!

 

"This is a business, this ain't unicef...maybe when unicef gets into the pilot paying business..."

 

The previous 2 posters have it correct. We will never see pay raises at the "entry level" regional job because there is a stack 5,000 reseme's deep to take our crappy low paying job. Mis-management knows this, therefore there is no incentive to raise the bar.

For example, take a look at Pinnacle's hiring practices over the past 5 years or so. In the beginning, they didnt need pilots as badly, so there were higher restrictions to getting a job. You needed over 1000 hours, had to pass a relatively hard written, pass a sim, then if you got hired, YOU had to PAY for your OWN hotel while in training. The company knew they would still have guys willing to come work there even with those restrictions, so why raise the bar at that time???

Skip ahead a few years to the 06-07 range, now Mis-management finds themselves deep in the hole, short on pilots. They cant get enough warm bodies in the door so they now start dropping the mins for the 200 hour wonder pilots, start to pay for the hotel AND pay people while they were in training. Its a complete 180 from a few years back. Its all a result of supply and demand. Right now there is a lot of supply of pilots and little to no demand. There is no reason to raise the pay/ raise the bar.

 

Yes and said management is part of the same management that outlines the working conditions of the flight crews...so much for quality. Im not ignorant, Im well aware of supply and demand and that doing this job is a choice. Renslow and Shaw made mistakes and paid with their lives. They have also been dragged through the mud in the media. Colgan and the FAA are also at least partly responsible because they also made a choice to put a very low price on some things that contribute to the safety of their passengers, flight crew and airplanes.

 

Where are these high-quality mgmt personnel of which you speak? Not so sure they're making their way to the airline industry.

 

Which is why eliminating commuting will NEVER go through. Not only would the pilots throw a fit, the cheap airline management would throw a fit too because they would actually have to provide locality pay.

 

Who's determining "quality" here. It's the executives that make the call on that, and they see their managers as more critical than the pilots. Pilots are willing to take crumbs and work 16 hours/day - managers are not. From their point of view, they can replace a pilot in a minute - they are no more valuable than bus drivers in their minds. They get the planes from Pt A to Pt B, that's all.

After all, we do this to ourselves. What other industry is filed with people that think that 300-hr employees are just as good as 5,000 hr employees? Lawyers, doctors, and most all other professions value experience and maintain standards. Pilots, on the other hand, will argue that the guy that just bought his rating and has a still wet ticket is just as capable as the 15-yr veteran at flying paying passengers in any weather condition.

As long as the pilots act as if they are all widgets, any one just as capable as the others, so will management.