My son made more than me (per month) during his software engineering internship at a startup last year than I make as a SWA FO. His 19-year old girlfriend, interning for the company behind a well-known app, made significantly more than him. His buddies who interned with finance companies made about as much per month as junior line-flying captains at SWA (esp when considering perks).

Remember, interns are usually kids who haven’t even graduated from college yet. In years gone by, and still in some industries, interns worked for free. Now, interns in certain careers earn more than experienced pilots. Something to think about.

The world is changing for a lot of reasons: globalization, technology, corporatization, the decline of organized labor, etc.

Whatever the reason, the glory days of this profession are gone. Concessions during the 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s all helped to bid adieux to the days of Catch Me If You Can. We have never come close to recovering. Accepting concessions now will only resume the decline in this profession and perhaps put a nail in the coffin that automation and artificial intelligence will one day probably drive home.

 

This is all correct. I have a friend and his college aged son has an acquaintance who did some kind of internship with Facebook and when I heard what this person was paid I almost fell over. Now admittedly, the person was highly qualified, great education from a school like MIT or Cal Tech or something like that, but still, I couldn't believe what this 19 or 20 year old was earning. We're talking like over six figures for a few months at Facebook, and I think it included housing and other perks.

Yes, technology will come for us all one day. But not until most of us have finished our careers. But it is inevitable. Like many jobs in the past, flying will eventually be more automated, initially single pilot with a ground-based monitor and then possibly fully automated. We'll see it first in package deliveries with drones and then short-haul freight with larger drones.

When Amazon announced a few years back that they planned to use drones to deliver packages I chuckled. I'm no longer laughing and wonder when this will be happening regularly. I digress.

 

Truer words have never been typed!

 

I’m sure there’s some communication, but we’re not ALPA and the MECs definitely are not as unified as the managements.

In fact, most pilots I’ve talked to have never heard of FH and have no idea they’re involved in our relationship with the company and to what extent. It would be nice to have more education on the dynamic of who and what we’re dealing with.

 

I have a friend whose son struggled through school but was always a hard worker. He interned as a plumber’s helper and began moonlighting in the evenings. By the time he was thirty he had a 20k foot shop, six trucks, numerous employees and the big house in town. He recently got his PPL and bought his own plane, a half million dollar Malibu. He makes far more than I and most pilots I fly with, but he’s a work-a-holic working insane amounts of hours doing what he loves.

 

I've been digging all your movie references lately. Gives me ideas to add to my quarantine queue.

 

God bless America!

 

I've always thought our various unions should have an A4A like structure for common issues and strategies. ALPA, APA, SWAPA, IPA, Teamsters and whoever else I forgot, would have a slightly bigger voice for labor.

 

They do, CAPA. It's not all inclusive unfortunately. From what I can tell ALPA and SWAPA are the only unions not part of it. SWAPA used to be but left for one reason or another.

https://www.capapilots.org


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SWAPA used to be a part, not sure what happened with that. Without ALPA, though...