More Culture Shortage Than Pilot Shortage
 

Based on my Air Force experience, here's my advice to managers and pilots in the regional airline game:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-vi...ot-chris-dupin

Short article, well written, many more layers of the onion to go. Nice job.


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Great post.

Regional management operates under the assumption that any warm body will do the job. What they fail to realize or appreciate is the return on investment for having a winning culture and happy/invested pilots.

How many times do disaffected pilots blow their entire day's pay worth of fuel by running "go home day" power settings? Pilots that are happy and appreciated can save the company a lot of money without sacrificing safety.

There is one key point that the article doesn't touch on, which is the distinction between the expected/desired time spent in the military and the regionals. Military wants just enough people to stay in to retirement (there is a shortage yet they are still forcing some fighter pilots out). The military shoots itself in the foot consistently with manning, but lifers are a key element to military manning. CEOs at regionals want turnover to be high at regionals. They don't want lifers. Lifers cost the company more money to do the same job, and they prevent movement and increase upgrade times. Our COO and the recruiter I talked to when I started at Mesa said as much...They wanted me in and then gone to bigger and better things in short order.

If management makes it just appealing enough to check career boxes (jet/captain experience), but not that great of a place to work, then people will come, regardless of the culture or pay, and hopefully not stay. Management will do the bare minimum financially to get meat in the seat. The lowest paying regional in the industry, Mesa, is still filling classes. It doesn't have a good reputation throughout the industry, the culture is okay, nothing great, but it is the movement and opportunity that brings people in. No one comes to Mesa saying "I like the culture." They come thinking they will upgrade quickly. Our last few classes still have a lot of people coming from other 121 carriers that have better pay and better cultures.

It is evident most regionals don't care who they hire in this environment. And that isn't just bottom feeders like Mesa, that is the case across the board. Sure culture will help reputation/word of mouth recruiting, and a bad culture will do the opposite in some cases (i.e. RAH). But it doesn't really matter to them. The culture metric just isn't important to bean counters and managers, because it doesn't really matter in the regional model.

And to the last paragraph re pilots trying to stick it to the man and burn more fuel...mainline buys our fuel. Sure my .82 vs .78 may burn a few hundred extra pounds, but regional flying contracts with mainline are hardly affected by fuel efficiency. Regional management likes to tout fuel savings, but I don't think they care. In Phoenix for example, they could hire more rampers at $10/hr to save 5-10 minutes per running CRJ that is waiting for marshallers, which happens several times a day. They routinely (at least at Mesa) wait until the last minute to fix MELd PACKS. I flew LAX-YEG-LAX-DEN one day at 240/250. That seems to happen a lot more than it should if they really cared about fuel savings.

There is no Pilot shortage. Just a Pilot-pay shortage........

Very true, but for the most part regional airlines don't buy their own fuel. At least not the one I'm at. It's all mainline ownded so running "go home" power, doest change the regional airlines direct expenses, and our normal cruise is basically the max we can should go anyway within .01-.02 if its super smooth. In fact a good chunk of our flights used to be filed at "go home power".

But I agree with what you are saying. Many other examples would work well too.

Yeah.... You can't really write a 100-page thesis on any of the social media sites.

I sit in the jumpseat over half the time to get to work, and I've never once seen the crew fly any kind of econ speed. I think that old trope is just what the mainline "partners" hit the regional management over the head with to justify not paying them more.

Bingo! The rest is irrelevant.

This is not true. While raising pay would help the regionals, there haven't been enough pilots training to replace those retiring and the people the regionals would take from 135 and 91 jobs. Big picture. I'm all for more money but actually believing that will 100% fix the problem is naive.

I think you may be right in the larger scheme of things, but not strictly in the 121 world. I read about flight schools struggling to find instructors, people not entering training, etc. Is it pay, just lack of interest in aviation, etc...? The upfront cost not worth the perceived long-term gain? This article is interesting and speaks to personal motivations. Some value...well...values when they consider professions, employers. At the end of the day, though, the great culture and pay curves have to meet on the performance chart:D
You cannot eat great morale, but I also believe only chasing the dollar is a quick recipe for disaster.

Super-64 - interesting screen name. Were you involved?

There's still plenty of interest in aviation among today's youth. Most have simply realized that the incredible debt load required just to qualify for your first job is simply not worth it. I'm not even talking about a fancy ERAU degree in whatever along with their flight training. Even going through a small FBO still requires a very large financial investment up front to get ones ratings. That still leaves one unhireable until a certain level of experience can be reached. All that time and effort just to get into the right seat of an RJ and the hope of someday making it to the "big time". To most people, it's simply not worth the financial risk.

This is what happens when flight training costs move up exponentially while wages stay stagnant for nearly a decade. Too much easy lending has driven up the costs of that training. The financial barrier of this career is the elephant in the room people seem to be tip toeing around.

Not true. Money will fix the shortage almost instantly. Do you know how many qualified pilots left the industry because of pay? Regional FO's should be making six figures, especially after going six figures in debt from school loans.

Pay regional pilots like the professionals they are (except the turds on guard)

Yes, I do know, but it still isn't enough to keep up with attrition. And if you raise pay to unrealistic levels, they'll just invest a ton of money in lobbying and technology to replace us faster.

Payroll is a total amount in any company. The issue in the airline industry isn't the total payroll, but how it is split between employees. The very heavy top end of airline pay requires a very thin bottom pay to balance things out. Pay isn't the issue so much as division of the pay. It is never going to be fixed because there is no interest on the part of labor and the economics of the airline industry doesn't generate the $$$ for the companies to fix it.

Ultimately though the airline industry offers the highest probable shot at entering the 1% with very limited specialized skills out of any career. Because of that it has been and always will be desirable roll of the dice for people and thus the pool of prospective pilots is always going to be there.

Flight training costs is only one expense! why don't you add other expenses for maintenance, environmental issues, attorneys on retainer, regulations, rules, policies, and opinions in which are presently wrecking this industry for top to bottom!

I argue that objectives may be different, but the lesson is the same. Money simply doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't for the military and (barring some crazy renegotiation of capacity fee arrangements), it won't solve it for the regionals either.


As much as they want you gone, they want someone to replace you. Heck, they want more than one person to replace you. I liken it to college: nobody expects you to stay for more than 4-5 years, but they still try really hard to get you on their property and later try hard to make you an ambassador of your college experience.

Look at Great Lakes: they have all the boxes (captain, turbine experience), yet the company is about to fold. Other firms are choosing different strategies (or perhaps have defaulted into a strategy).

The regionals don't care who they hire, but the applicants care where they go. As it becomes evident that there are more regional airline seats than butts to sit in those seats, job seekers now have a choice. I offer that "culture" should be something that applicants look at in addition to upgrade times, salary, and all that other stuff that fits easier into metrics.

Agreed. My local WIA chapter is full of people at atp mins or close to them that are in other careers and fly as a hobby. They're always telling me how they think I have the best job, I'm living the dream, etc, and they'd jump ship from there careers in a heartbeat if the money was better.

If starting pay was $80k instead of $20-35k, and if they could break 6 figures within a couple years, they'd be able to come on over without having to worry about how to feed their kids and pay their mortgages, and I think quite a few would do it.

bold pilot

Do you think flight instruction was free back in the day? When I was paying $25/hour for a C150, gas was .52/Gal, it still cost most of a day's wage for a an hour of instrument instruction. It's always been expensive!

Yes flight training has always been relatively expensive. But the cost has risen at a rate completely disconnected from typical inflation. It's not uncommon to see rates close to $200/hr for some primary training aircraft. I'm no financial whiz, so I'm not gonna dazzle with some fancy diagrams and charts, but the cost to join the club has been priced out of many peoples reach. There's plenty of dumbasses that bought their way into a job they have no business being in. But on the flip side, there's also a lot of potentially fine aviators that never will be due to the staggering cost and ridiculously low rate of return on the training investment.

Nobody ever said doubling pay would properly staff all the airlines but it would quickly week out the crappy ones that don't have the business plan to pay their workforce. Not every company will survive and not everyone should. In short increasing pilot pay will fix staffing for companies that can afford to invest in their workforce. Envoy is hosed