Cubdriver

Agree, and I have done both jobs. The airline training and pilot background was far more intense and did indeed require a lot of OTJ experience to begin (1500 hours) and the wages are substandard, ludicrous by comparison with other similar professions. Engineering entailed a (very) long haul to finish school, and it was rigorous coursework that included a lot of overnight work to finish, massive loans and so on, but there was zero <0> on OTJ experience required to start a job at $50 to $60k.

Boiler, you make lots of great points on these boards but this is not among them. Strong links can be shown between poverty, lack of sleep, poor nutrition and low academic achievement in school children. Poverty among airline pilots most certainly seems to bear the same linkage. Congress decided as much when they made the current Colgan 3407-driven rule changes. The basic idea is if getting by takes up all your time and energy, that energy is gone and cannot be expended somewhere else (ie. flying safely).

I am among those who think the markets have failed to insure adequate salaries for entry- level airline pilots. When the market fails, regulation must take over. If we have airplanes falling out of the sky and the cause is linked to low wages and fatigue (and they have been linked in multiple places), then something is wrong with market wage and the system should be fixed. Congress stepped in and mandated new rules to fix the problem, we'll see how effective that is, but the cause still remains pretty clear- low wages.

BoilerUP

I know that.

But I'd submit that very few people on APC have ever seen genuine "poverty", and REAL poverty should not be confused with regional pilots crying "broke" (again, I was one). I doubt any probationary regional airline pilots (short of maybe Lakes pilots) are worrying about where their next meal is going to come from.

Fatigue happens, but jumpseating overnight into the start of a trip is a decision. And as I've demonstrated, such a decision is optional - there are alternatives for somebody who can't afford a $75 hotel room 4+ times a month.

My issue is people who seem to intimate higher compensation = safer pilots. That is simply not true, even if you replace "safer" with "more rested". Higher compensation would certainly make it easier for people, but its no easy silver bullet.

E2CMaster

I'm still paying off school 13 years later, and I can tell you with $800/mo in student loan payments between me and my wife we would be wondering where our next meal is coming from at regional wages if that was my only job. I'm not saying it's right, wrong or indifferent, but the pay model kind of stinks.. Maybe back when 250 and the ink drying on your commercial was the hiring mins the pay made sense.

But now where you have to have 1500/ATP? That's like paying pizza delivery boy wages for a semi truck driver hauling dynamite.

LarryDavid

This is truth. Even highly compensated captains do commutes that are beyond absurd(like commuting in the J/S all night from hawaii to start a trip at 7am in SFO/LAX). There are some that even commute from Australia/Asia/Europe. The Feds can use FAR 117 as political theatre all they want but the fact that they use split duty(CDOs) is proof that they really don't care. You can still do 4 am shows EST when you are on western time.

They can make all the regulations they want but at the end of the day it is truly up to the pilot himself to make the call if he is fit for duty or not. Some pilots may be able to sleep just fine while commuting on a redeye and be fully rested. Some pilots may get to the outstation at noon and choose to stay up until midnight with a 5 am show and be dead tired. Some pilots may have a 9 am show in domicle but live 4 hours away in some small town with no airline service so they have to wake up at 4 am to get ready after going to bed at midnight.

You can not regulate all the possibilities and to be honest the old system was better IMO. Leave it to the individual to determine his fitness for duty. With these new rules you work more for less pay per day. If you limit reduced rest to once per trip and maybe account for hotel drive times it is a much better way to do things than this abortion of a law. You can't even pick up an extra out and back at the end of your trip now unless you have 10 hrs between them.

John Carr

In an ideal world, that's how it would work. But I'm not so sure you FULLY understand that. You are aware of such things as the RLA, etc?

But getting past that, the concept ISN'T that dissimilar than when the legacies were in BK and trying to tell the pilots that they should "sack up and stop voting in concessionary contracts" would go. Here's how;

The legacy pilots could have done that. THEN management takes it to the BK judge, and more than likely it DOESN'T go in the pilot's favor.

At the regional level, they turn a crappy contract down, the scenarios are different depending on the circumstances. If they're wholly owned and under a sham BK, well, it's not that hard to see what will happen. If they're not wholly owned, they turn it down. Management says "OK", lets tell our mainline partners that we're no longer "cost competitive", see how that works out.

IOW, there's a THRID PARTY entity that's ACTUALLY the puppet master.

Sorry, but the concept of the regional provider TELLING the legacy how much the feed is going cost, as well as coming back and telling the legacy it's going to cost MORE just isn't the way this train wreck of an industry operates. And asking ALPA national to support such a notion would be viewed as ludicrous at best. Moak (the joke) has ALREADY deemed it so.

AtlCSIP

There are no PE's out of college. PE licensure requires a certain amount of experience after college prior to sitting for the licensing exams.

BoilerUP

This is very true, and something I should have made more clear in my post by saying "starting wages for engineers" instead of "PEs".

Not unlike having AIA or LEED certification...

chazbird

I'm glad someone else did the math on what I thought was needed some time ago, the seat costs needed to make flying for a regional reasonable-livable. That math came out to even less than I had originally came up with. Less than a dollar a seat per leg.

I also used to think of the tip jar by the door, after the after landing announcement of how much the pilots were paid for that leg around those thunderstorms.

But, after years of thinking about helping the poor regional pilots I realize they have done nothing to help themselves, nor, of course have their unions, nor, their mainline "brothers". So, who is going to help them? No one but themselves.

When friends seek out tickets to someplace and ask me for advice I now steer them away from any carrier that will have a portion of that flight on a regional flight, which I call the slave ship. These friends all want to buy ethically grown food, coffee, so they naturally think it's best to avoid such terrible labor practices? They are, as it turns out, quite happy taking a trip on Southwest or Jet Blue. Is this wrong of
me? Maybe, maybe not. The regional pilots are not helping themselves, so maybe some outside protection from themselves is in order.

Besides the less than a dollar per seat per leg pay rate that would lift the pilots into a livable specter, let's also agree that the low pay model, so far does not seem to be correlated with a decline in safety I say, so what? Is that what's it all about? No desire to save for your children's college? Not live in a crime ridden section of town? The ruthless business model is very true, but a deeper psychology stands behind it. hey have learned regional pilots will stand for it, and they exploit that. It's probably a laughing matter for them now, the bar is so low now that wages would have to double to make things halfway decent towards a livable professional wage. But someone forgot, somewhere, this is a professional level career with extremely high responsibilities. Instead, management laughs at regional pilots and seems to see no end in humiliating the pilots. So much so when I hear pilots say to themselves we knew what it was like when we got into it, so I guess there's nothing I or we can do - that it seems they welcome the abuse. Yea, you know the plane, are technically proficient, fly safe, do a good job, and yet, as far as your own self respect or the ability to support your family as it deserves, somehow that seems to be something worth discarding or not seriously considering. How would this feel for a pilot to hear their 5 year old ask their spouse why daddy is a loser?

Hurryage65

Don't forget underplayed pilots are working for regionals. Which equals Many more legs a day on much more "dangerously" maintained aircraft. Simple math and probability proves it will be more unsafe than mainline flying less legs. Slap that onto the daily grind which yes I believe does cause a pilot to cut corners and safety without even knowing it. It's easy to say ya come in the night before to commute, its a choice but I'm going to take that early AM flight so I can be with my family on my day off

Joliet

Agreed 100%