The lunacy of airline pay calculation
 

This is an honest question.

The system of pay in the airline industry is beyond convoluted. The rules covering regular pay, soft pay, deadhead pay, breaking guarantee pay...I mean, they make the engineer's panel of a Lockheed Constellation look positively minimalist and simplistic by comparison. Just trying to understand the airline pay system would probably drive an accomplished corporate tax accountant to an early grave.

I know of no other industry that is legally allowed to require an employee to report for work at 0800, finish duty at 2100, and get paid for 4 hours of work. (As happened to me today.)

Why are we paid this way? Why don't we have a system like every other hourly job in America, where you are paid from the time you clock in till the time you clock out, minus perhaps a lunch break?

Why do we allow ourselves to give 13 hours of our lives for 4 hours of pay?

Seriously?

Because saying you make $22 an hour sounds a lot better than making $6 an hour...or whatever your measly wage is. Walking thru an airport and around a jet looking for discrepancies isn't work, just time consuming. Plus, if I miss something on preflight, I can just tell them they get what they pay for.

Many many pure salary jobs work this way. I work in the Army Reserves and there is no such thing as a duty day, we work until the job or mission is complete. But many jobs in corporate America often involve working late hours etc with no extra incentive pay.

I agree that regional pay is crap, but there's many jobs that don't pay extra if you don't leave the office til 10pm. If you want the least amount work for the most pay and don't want to hold out for a Legacy gig trying flying corporate. Most (keyword being MOST) corporate guys I know/talk to fly about half as much as I do. The catch is that they're on call almost every day...

You are indeed correct; I've spent the past 18 years in corporate America. However, salaried jobs are just that -- salaried. There is no pretense of paying an hourly rate. You're paid a certain amount per year, and you certainly don't clock in or out. The airline industry is different in that we are allegedly paid an hourly rate for our time.

And yet it is perfectly acceptable in this industry for one to be paid for 4 hours when one was available to the company for more than three times that number.

I just don't get it. How did we, as pilots, decide that the only time worth being compensated for is the time between door close and door open? It's an honest question. I don't know the answer. I'm just curious as to how the industry came to adopt such practices.

Didn't a group of policemen recently sue and win a class-action suit because they weren't being paid for the first 30 minutes they reported to work (such time was used for changing clothes in the locker room, catching up on daily briefs, etc., before hitting the street.) How are we any different?

Because one day you're going to be flying 2 weeks out of the month making $240/hour, with 3 sports cars and a harley in your garage.

Because people keep showing up to work at the regionals thinking that this will happen.

LOL. Not everyone. Just me.

More like a used miata and a scooter.

Of course, and my Miata will be Fuchsia Red, for the ladies...

In a perfect world, pilots Would get paid from report time at an airport until he is arriving in the hotel. Or If at home base, when the last paperwork is done...

Duty rigs.

Filler.

kahfmi,

Read Flying the Line, George Hopkins explains it all. National Labor Board Decision 83 is the basis for being paid 'by the hour' from a formula derived from speed and weight. This is pretty basic ALPA and industry stuff you should know.

Duty rigs came long after Decision 83 in 1936. ALPA and all the contracts since have been founded on this decision.

GF

^^^^^^^^
Read Flying the Line, parts 1 & 2. Used to be recommended reading for all airline pilots. My local Union at my first airline job gave you a copy when you got hired.

Flying The Line 1/2 and Hard Landing should be mandatory reading for people new to 121.

As for airline pay, you kinda do have a "salary", its called minimum guarantee.

Work rules WRT pay aren't THAT complicated, and if one can't figure it out by reading their CBA and seeing a few examples, perhaps operating high speed aluminum tubes through a dynamic fluid environment ain't for you.

Lol, well it certainly didn't take you long to become cynical. We told you so.

You were on duty for 13 hours and received 4 hours of pay? I thought skywest had a 2:1 duty rig which would of been 6.5 hours of pay? What's the catch with this 2:1 duty rig at skywest?

It's only for scheduled duty days. Doesn't apply to delays.

So in other words, it's completely useless. Haha.

At my last airline I was paid by the mile...

If you don't like the pay, don't become an airline pilot. That helps two ways 1. We won't have to listen to you b#tch and moan and 2. It'll push the supply and demand further in our favor.

I read Flying The Line a while back and fell asleep. Guess I'll go look at it again.

There was a lawsuit in 2013 where two FA's sued Delta for not being paid while at work. I tried to find updates through the court system but never got anywhere. I assume if they had won we would have heard something by now.

Logan Flight Attendants Take on Delta Air Lines in Wage Allegations | Open Media Boston

In reality when you are making that kind of money you realize suddenly you only have five years left on your career but have no retirement savings, owe 90% on your house and are still paying off those student loans that you refinanced several times to avoid bankruptcy early in your career.

That's when you realize that leasing three cars and a motorcycle wasn't a good idea because you barely passed your last medical.

edit: I forgot to mention the alimony and child support you are paying because your ex wives weren't as patient as you.

OP, you seem like a smart, educated guy. The answer to your question is obvious. We get paid the way we do because we are willing to show up for what is offered.

In your case that's a guarantee of 76 hours a month at $24 an hour, -- or $1824 a month or $21,888 a year. Kind of makes you a little sick thinking about it that way. All of that education and money spent of flight training for that level of compensation.

GF I just finished FATE IS THE HUNTER. Thanks for the suggestion, it is a great book. If there is a pilot on these forums that has not read it, highly recommended. FLYING THE LINE is next.

The pay still blows regardless of the explanation.

SP35

I'll pass on all aviation themed tales...especially non-fiction. There's nothing worse than hearing a pilot talk about himself

History is stoopid, not like we can learn anything from the past anyway...

For every single one of these guys, I'll show you a dozen that never got there.

This is the real problem. This industry is a lot of smoke and mirrors; magic acts that never actually produce. It is what keeps suckering people into this thinking that paying your dues early will pay off in the long run, when in actuality, it is a relatively low amount of lottery winners that do.

Welcome to the industry sucker.

(Facepalm)

I've studied history. I've studied aviation accidents. I've studied aviation safety. I don't find any other professional development in reading aviation non-fiction during my free time. Just like when I was in the military, I found little value in perpetually reading about every self proclaimed hero and his leadership tactics. My organizations were some of the best disciplined, best performing and highest morale units on base.

Pay pilots based on how much time they spend at an airport (or on duty) and the airplanes will never leave the gate...

We get paid less hours, thus (on average) our hourly wages are higher to compensate. That being said, I have younger relatives in college that make more in a day at their internship than I do in a day at my career. Go figure.

Flying the Line Vol 1/2 covers the history of ALPA, from the early days of collective bargaining in a fledgling industry to the upheaval post-Deregulation. Covers lockouts, strikes, scabs, Lorenzo, and every variation in between that influences the decision of pilots and pilot groups to this day.

Hard Landing is a great insight into the viewpoint of airline management and how different tactics (namely Kelleher at Southwest and Crandall at American) were utilized for growth...and how those tactics influenced employee morale.

If you or anyone else can't find "professional development" from reading those historical perspectives of our industry and apply them to the circumstances of the last 20 or so years up to and including today...well, we're bound for another frakkin' Cylon loop because all of this has happened before and will happen again.

Utah,

Thank you. To the other posters, I'm not complaining about the amount of hourly pay. We all understood the pay rates before we signed up.

What I just can't understand is why, in the modern age, anyone of us is OK with giving, say, 14 hours of our day and being paid for 4. How is it that we've all agreed that time spent preflighting an aircraft, running pre start checks, checking weather, etc., is all time that should go unpaid?

I suppose the other way to look at it is to ignore the hourly pay and simply look at the monthly guarantee as a monthly salary.

It still boggles my mind, though... In my other life I run a small design studio that does a lot of work for a company that begins with G and ends with oogle. We have a number of designers and writers on our payroll. I've tried to explain the airline pay system to my team and they simply can't believe I'm telling the truth. If anyone in the design industry tried to implement similar pay rules, they'd instantly find themselves bereft of employees...

Are your employees salary or hourly?

If salary, do they work 40 hours a week, or as many hours as necessary to meet the clients' needs? Is there any way for them to earn income beyond their salary (bonus excluded) for working beyond the standard "work week"?

The pay system isn't "better" or "worse", it is just different...and really, its not a difficult concept to wrap your head around.

Put another way: athletes are paid by "game checks", yet they are still expected to train in the off season, show up at training camp, come to practice, and participate in OTAs, etc...

You're 100% right and usually only the folks who didn't grow up submitting to standard aviation abuse really get this point.

My opinion...

1) Eliminate longevity for pay purposes. Equipment/seat pay would be a fixed figure (subject to COLA raises). This would allow airlines to attract and retain entry-level talent, and remove most of the incentive to destroy a high-longevity airline and replace it with a low-longevity startup.

Longevity would still apply for traditional things like vacation accrual, 401k vesting, etc. so you do get rewarded for sticking around.

Seniority would still of course apply for schedules, vacation bidding, equipment/seat/domicile bidding.


2) A step further...eliminate block pay and replace with duty pay (like any other industry). Duty pay would be lower than current block pay, based on a formula like this...

Assume a five-hour block is minimum desired productivity, and say three legs is average.

Old rate: $100/block hour

New rate: 5 hours x $100 = $500 for the day.

Now we add up the non-flight duty for three reasonably efficient legs:
Report - block out: 45m
2nd Turn: 30m
3nd Turn 30m
Block in- duty off: 15m
Total = 2 hours

Block + non-flight duty = 7 hours. Since we got paid $500 for that reasonably efficient 7 hour duty day, our new duty rate would be $72/duty hour.

Ramifications:

- Company has incentive to schedule efficiently...non-productive duty time is no longer free to the company.

- If company can't schedule efficiently we get paid for our time.

- Super senior folks no longer enjoy windfall combinations of high pay combined with highly efficient trips while junior folks suck up lengthy unpaid sits combined with low pay and multiple legs.

- Seniority still buys many perks...you can bid long duty days to get pay more if you want, and still get weekends holidays off as always.

- We get paid for IROPS.

- Takes some of the sting out of switching airlines, but that shouldn't really be necessary since there would be little incentive to shuffle flying around.

And this is the problem with the up and coming aviators. You entered the market knowing the way you will be paid. More than willing to take that shiny jet job. Don't take those regional jobs and there wouldn't be a regional lifestyle.

Get out now because you won't be any less of a complainer at a major carrier.

If you don't have the desire / ability to read and understand the history of ALPA you are wasting your dues dollars. ALPA has a lot of warts and the books put them in perspective as a necessary evil.

You keep saying you don't understand but you won't follow the advice given that explains it to you.

Read the books. Stay awake. Then if you want to effect change, work from the inside to begin this change verses just *****ing. It's all explained pretty clearly.

This^^^^^^^^!

Exactly, read the books. Even the boring parts.

I'm sure you've heard this before but being on reserve versus being a line holder is almost like working for two different companies.

Reserve pairing aren't subject to duty or premium guarantees. Line holders typically would only wind up in a situation like that if there were a maintenance problem at an outstation or bad weather delays. Myself, I haven't been delayed more than an hour or so in years.

Just another one of the reasons why hundreds of FOs that could upgrade choose not to. -- or why the "lifers" choose not to move on and start over at the bottom.