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.