azapateiro1

I agree, I do think airline would rather cxl flight than increasing the salary to pilot to these levels.

would a $35-40.00 hr first year be too much?...I prefer to be a CFI making 35k to 45K and coming back hm every night .

Cubdriver

Actually Boiler is a tad low (he said $40/60/80k). Here are the top paying salaries for new hires in the US (see link). Wages should match other professions. There is no reason new pilots should get less than the others, the cost of training is the same, $60k from day one is the typical salary. But there is a glut of qualified pilots in the US and entry level wages are heavily depressed by the oversupply.

lear 31 pilot

I have to ask why it is unrealistic to make 80k by year three. I think the real solution may be to not have such a huge gap in pay between the right seat and left seat, lets say 80k and 120k, maybe I am shooting for the stars, but I bet the airlines could do it tomorrow and make a profit still.

waflyboy

A contributing factor might be that the cost of training doesn't necessarily have a direct impact on the starting salary. In your example a petroleum engineering grad earns almost 60 percent more than an MIS grad, but presumably the cost of education is similar. The difference is that engineering school is highly competitive and people with engineering skills are widely sought.

Becoming a successful engineer takes a certain combination of intellectual capacity, willingness to work through difficult material, and interest in the field. Within the population of people who can become engineers (ie college freshmen), the percentage that will become engineers is fairly small - because most are weeded out by one of these hurdles. Hence, the "supply" of engineers is relatively small in a world where engineering expertise is increasingly valuable.

In short, the cost of training has a weaker relationship to salary than the relative demand for a certain skillset.

Of course if the cost of training gets too high (relative to the expected salary), fewer (rational) skill seekers will choose to participate in a given field. As a result of this and industry attrition and/or growth, the labor supply can become relatively more scarce. This is when elementary supply and demand concepts predict that wages will begin to increase, so as to satisfy equilibrium of supply and demand. And this is what so many regional pilots are betting on in the current environment.

I hope it works out. But the real world isn't fairly represented by the vacuum in which undergrad econ is taught - there's a lot of friction here, perhaps most notably government regulation and the CPAs that regionals operate under. In others words, I don't think meaningful wage increases are likely anytime soon.

I think you answered your own question... isn't this "the reason?"

Cubdriver

I''m not omniscient but yes, it's the reason I think pilot wages are not in keeping with similar professions. You mention engineering as a select profession with more weed outs than others, agree, but that $60k starting salary is an average for college degree jobs, not just engineering and a few select jobs that happen to pay well. There are some jobs that start at less than $40k but not many. The average is $60k for a new recruit in the educated domestic workplace, and as you know new airline pilots are get less than half of that, and oversupply has to be the reason.

wjsx

FWIW, NBC News w/ Brian Williams just did about 15 sec. on the GAO report. The focus was on a pilot shortage driven by low pay for pilots at regional airlines. It mentioned that new pilots are paid äs little as $16,000 yearly with the average starting pay at 22K.

Seems like network news got the essential headline right.

BoilerUP

The link you posted to Forbes disputes that $60k is the average starting salary for college graduates with a bachelors degree.

Cubdriver

Well they do not give that information in the Forbes article, but a quick averaging of what they do show gets about $51k so I was a little off.

RV5M

Flying isn't even in the same category as the jobs you've listed. We're more on the blue-collar, skilled labor side of things. It's clear to me that many of the pilots I've worked with wouldn't even be capable of completing the education necessary to do something like computer or aerospace engineering. All kinds of people enjoy flying and have chosen to make a career of it, but the barrier to entry is also much lower than certain STEM careers.

Airline first officers should be paid more, but when I consider the realities of what we do, it seems that the high end of the pay scale should be lowered. The idea of a $200,000 base salary airline captain just doesn't make sense to me when I consider the vast amount of knowledge and experience required for other jobs that pay slightly less.

BoilerUP

Yup, makes no sense whatsoever highly compensating the highly experienced person responsible for a nine-figure asset containing hundreds of lives and/or millions of dollars of cargo in all types of weather.

Just a bunch of lunch pail carrying button pushers...assembly line workers of the sky with no education or knowledge required. So easy a caveman can do it.