GoCats67

The chicken has come home to roost. When you make a career so bad that nobody is willing to go into it, eventually you will have problems.

in the years since 9-11 management has been able to whipsaw effectively and erode the value of this career. Now they will be forced to pay the piper!

This is great news for all of us and will help put rational aircraft scheduling back into practice. When you can pay a pilot nothing to fly a 50 seater it makes the economics of pilot pay on every larger aircraft suffer. Now that you are going to have to pay pilots a reasonable wage (or at least we are heading in that direction) , true market forces will again drive the aircraft routing world.

Bravo to Eagle for standing up! I hope you don't suffer too much in the short term and I know you will benefit from a much better career in the long term.

As always the beers will be on me!

Thedude

Hopefully we will see the commuters shrunk back to where they were prior to the invent of the RJ.

krudawg

My guess is if they can't find enough pilots, our management will be negotiating a pay-scale so we can fly it. Hmm, let's see, lots of take-offs and landings, long days; We should negotiate 737 pay minus $1.00.

pilot64golfer

Why not pay band it with the guppy and get the Airbus and 757 back into mainline wage rates?

That way the little airplanes pay the same and the mainline ones pay more.

WS01

got my faa med today, the doc only does FAA meds and said a few years ago he would issue 2 or 3 student pilot certificates a day, now it s about one every 3 weeks.

nobody will to go into dept and work for $20,000/year

ccb2000

Hmmmm...

ALPA's Message for Aspiring Aviators: The Looming Pilot Shortage Is a Myth | Flying Magazine

and...

What Can New Pilots Make? Near Minimum Wage - WSJ.com

Dave Fitzgerald

Shortages can manifest solutions in funny ways. Be carful what you wish for. A quick and easy solution to the problem, again, would be change the retirement age again. I think we do not need to go there again.

Toddnel

The Bus and the 757 are paying industry average right now. This guppy you speak of is now bigger than your 757's so I'm not sure why you want it to pay so much less, especially seeing as the 757s are all going to the dessert soon. I've never seen a group of people so anxious to take a pay cut when the 757's and 747's leave the fleet just so they can say they made a few bucks more today.

The 737s today are a far cray from the ratted out old guppies United flew in the 80's. Like it or not they will be the majority of the fleet for a long time.

Mason32

Which is why it is important to correct every reporter who claims it is an actual shortage. Right now it is only a shortage of pilots willing to work for regional wages. Plenty of licensed ATPs out there right now.
The current problem is pay related shortage. Fix the pay, and you fix the problem. In a few more years it will be a physical shortage of pilots as insufficient people are pursuing the profession. Again, fix the wages and working conditions and the problem goes away. Drop the RLA and 90% of the problems would fix themselves.

Probe

I had a Fed tell me that the FAA issued some unbelievably low number of Comm Inst and ATP licenses this last couple of years. I want to say it was under 200 a year but I can't remember the number. It was shocking.

They could open up the work visa gates, but no one would come to work here for 20k a year either. Not when you have to have 1500 hours.


No guppy on earth is bigger than any 57.

Sorry. Don't say guppy.

Trivia question. Does a 900 Guppy, or a 757, fly a full plane of passengers and cargo from Maui to SFO without light loading the fuel and landing in HNL to fill up with gas for the crossing?