Why only block pay?
 

After having a couple of drinks with my wife last night, we got on the topic of pilot pay. She said she thinks it's crazy how little we get paid when we're sitting around the airport between flights. So, I mentioned the whole block pay concept and she asked why we don't get our hourly pay when we're doing actual pilot duties (i.e. preflight, flight planning). I actually hadn't really given it thought, but why don't we get paid at report time, or 45 min prior to block out?
I don't expect anything to be solved here, just curious what everyone's thoughts are.

A lot of things were sort of arbitrary when they got started (which side of the road you drive on for example). But now that they are established and written into a multitude of contracts, it would take effort and negotiation to change them. And no doubt the initial management response to such a contract change would be an hourly wage decrease intended to make it a zero-sum game. So inertia alone will probably keep the current system.

Remember there are also duty rigs and minimum day computations designed to punish the schedule makers if your productivity wanes. Cheers.

I think a reasonable approach would be FLIGHT pay, ON DUTY pay, and Per Diem.

Flight pay is for when flying, per diem is for off duty but still on a trip. ON DUTY pay would be for all those other times you mentioned. It seems unreasonable to be paid 100-300 dollars an hour to have an airport sit.....but it’s also unreasonable that we are paid a few dollars an hour for those same duties. There should be a rate we are paid during our duty day that consists of time other than block pay. $20-$30 an hour maybe? Who knows? It’s a novel concept that’s very unlikely to gain any traction.

Netjets started flight pay 10 months ago on top of basic salary.

It would come at the expense of our top rate. We could probably get it by foregoing raises for 1 contract cycle. We would feel like we are getting paid but in reality as someone said above it’s a zero sum.

Call me blasphemous, but our pay is pretty darn good at the moment. I’m making 250k a year (plus profit sharing, 32k+ 401k, etc) as a bottom reserve CA and theoretically, only up to go pay-wise. Point being, we could rearrange the structure of our pay, but I don’t think it would result in a direct increase in overall compensation. A better path seems to be to focus on trip/duty “rigs” to incentivize more productive trip building (and of course job security provisions, so we can keep this momentum going).

And our model isn’t unique. Therapists, and other consultants/experts charge very high hourly rates, because they don’t “bill” anywhere close to 40 hours a week. Their expertise comes on the back of years of “unpaid” time in their field and often must continue to spend countless unpaid hours keeping abreast of current affairs/theories/ideas and preparing/researching clients so as to continue to be viewed as the “experts” their pay suggests.

Food for thought

Only partially true - many professionals (lawyers, consultants etc.) bill 60 hours per week at super high rates.

I like all of the ideas and thoughts being thrown out there!

I also understand that this would be impossible to get the company on board. Like a few people have mentioned, IF they were to agree to it, I'm sure they would play with the numbers for the net zero.

Funny, that some people have mentioned how much certain professions charge per hour. That is what got my wife and I talking about this in the first place. She's a physician and made the comment that anesthesiologist don't only get paid once the surgery starts. They have their own "preflighting", intubation, etc. that they're getting paid for the entire time.

Because, it's not "industry standard"...

Man, it's been while since I've seen this topic brought up. Happened more frequently at the regionals since we were pretty much rig free and did A LOT of sitting.

Maybe we should use professional negotiators instead of pilots. ;)

Welcome to one of the historic discussions on our pay. Back in the day, 1981, the UAL contract had a flat salary based on 81 hours for 737 pilots. The idea was to give scheduling the ability to try and be more efficient in the hourly scheduling. End result, they actually flew the pilots less and we sat around more.

The regulatory whats, when’s and how in compensation usually falls to the department of labor.
In the 135 world, I’ve worked for companies who ‘exempt’ pilots and others who couldn’t. We would compensate on those guidelines, such as travel time or training.

Let’s start with paying more than 3.75hrs for a 6hr sim session and paying more than just $10 in per diem for a 4hr field standby. I wonder what your doctor wife thinks about that?

Kinda balances out when you do a late flight out to MCI from ORD, then DH back the next day and get 10 hours of pay...

More food for thought.

Right, except when professional negotiators look all the **** we get paid for that we don't ever do, it would wash ;)

Often times, it doesn't matter if it's the spouse thats been with you since the beginning or a random stranger, trying to explain how we get paid is an exercise in futile and frustration laden.

There was one of those old "extranormal" videos of the cartoon conversations from long ago with a funny exchange of a pilot explaining how we get paid to a passenger, pretty much summer it up.

To answer the original question. Aircraft costs are directly related to anytime they are turned on, IE, hobbs meter, engine running. Roughly equates to block time. So pilot and FA pay is tied to the operation of the aircraft, hence block time.

I agree, we should be paid anytime we are on duty, but alas, this is not the case.

Aircraft cost are related to cycles, not to hobbs, and definitely not to block. You fly between IAD and JFK, half of your block is flight time. You fly IAH SYD 95% of your block is flight time.
My plan:
Flight pay (on a leg by leg basis) should start 45 minutes before scheduled departure, and end 15 minutes after brakes set, doors open, engines off (whichever is last). If you keep the same aircraft for the next leg, reduce pay by 30 minutes. Any time between legs over 1 hour pays 1 minute per 3 minutes.

I disagree. Maintenance is figure depending on the part, mostly by flt time. Fatigue life is figured on cycles. Fuel does not cost on cycles. EG. Heavy maintenance is figured based on calendar and flight time.

A 30k hour guppy is certainly not figured the same as a 30k 777. Number of cycles are drastically different. So it depends.