Alright here is some extremely simple math with numbers to explain how easy it COULD be...

American Airlines alone flew roughly 100 million passengers in 2013. If you raised those 100 million tickets sold that year by $10, you have just generated 1 Billion dollars more in revenue for that year. Divide that out by a work force of 40,000 crews (include flight attendants, airline pilots, mechanics, etc.) That is a $25,000 a year raise for 40,000 crew members.

That 100 million passengers is how many passengers were carried on American metal. This doesn't include the 10s of millions carried on their regional feed.

I think it is easy to ascertain that raising pilot wages would not be difficult, and it would not really hurt the mainline companies at all. However, until pilots keep thinking short term and vote in concessionary and limiting contracts selling themselves short, a raise that everyone wants will never happen.

 

He** no... but I didn't vote for McSame or Rooney like you did.

Yet you still work for comedy pay.

 

That hypothetical $10 hike in fares, would lead to a decrease in PRASM. It really is that volatile. In a world where passengers will pick one airline over another to save literally a dollar, a $10 hike can take your ticket sale from being #1 on (insert travel website here) to #12 on the list.

There are very smart people (ya laugh all you want, but wrap your head around the complexity and fluidity) that have written very sophisticated algorithms that are constantly adjusting the price of a ticket for a given flight, for a given day, for given demand, second by second. A very minor flaw in one of those formulas cost our company (so they say) several hundred million in revenue in 2013. We still made a profit, but it would have been more. When they looked back at why we were so far behind they found the algorithm was a few minutes behind the competition in adjusting fares.

 

This. We really have to start looking at the big picture.

 

True, I totally understand that fluidity. You can't have just one carrier raise prices. It would have to be across the board. Therein lies some of the difficulties that some of the more bloated carriers with regionals struggle with over other airlines like Southwest which has a very streamlined product.

A duplication of many employee roles spread out among regional airlines makes it effectively more expensive overall, and the pilots are taking the big hit for that in order for a regional model to make sense to the mainlines.

Southwest (just using them as an example, I realize there are others...) has one set of dispatchers, crew schedulers, HR department, Training department, management, etc.

Now for each airline you need duplicates of all those things, and therein lies extra costs and inefficiencies. These costs need to be made up somehow. Either the regionals have to charge more for their services, or all the employees working there get paid less than they are worth.

 

Alright slick, i'll bite and try to explain it to you. Its not really math were talking about its taxes. When you increase an employees salary you also increase the taxes owed to the IRS, Medicaid, SS, and don't forget the 401K matching. Your "math" doesn't take into account any of these numbers. So, as a former math teacher I say you failed this little lesson.

 

I'm assuming you are an RJ driver who thinks he is underpaid and over worked. I'm in the same boat, but at the same time, no one held a gun to my head telling me I have to do this for as career. You can very well go do something else, work less amount of time and probably make more money if you wanted to, because, again, you have the free will. So it's hard for me to live off of first year FO pay, but I'm doing it because I want to, not because I have to. So suck it up and put on your big boy pants and go to work.

 

My point is simply this: US airlines could easily solve the issues of the pilot shortage and the embarrassingly low regional pilot pay, (which CAUSED the pilot shortage),...... IF they wanted to. And it wouldn't cost them a lot off of the top line or the bottom line.

To my way of thinking, it's closer to a rounding error than an additional cost. Yet apparently they would rather remain stingy and blame congress for the pilot shortage that they, themselves, have created.

 

So are you saying people should never strive to improve this career because we choose to do it?

 

At any job, any, people always want to be paid more. My strive to improve is to make it to the mainline and money will be there. Crying about how we can make $10 dollars more by increasing airfare that regionals have no control over the ticket prices gets us nowhere. So tell me, you think it will change because someone did a quick 2nd grader's math problem?