Bringupthebird
Grumpy? Who-Me?
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2006
- Posts
- 2,182
It's always been that way grumps, we just got lazy w/ our unions and had corrupt nmb and gov't officials w/ an agenda interferring w/ our negotiating ability.
Why do you suppose United hired people with 200 hours? Were they passing over guys with 10,000 hours? Could it have been the fact that they had hundreds of jets on order and a ton of retiring prop pilots who were unwilling to embrace change?
The point is, when this job was at it's greatest, it was very difficult to get. When the RJ explosion proved that you can throw a 300 hour guy into a jet and they don't come falling from the skies, it meant that experience was overpriced and unnecessary.
It's unnecessary to make this a young/old thing. The young should see the airline pilot job as one of many they will have over the course of their lives rather than as a lifelong career.
The fantasy of the white-haired old salt retiring to his sailboat after a well-lived career is a bunch of crap. He's down filling out an application at Home Depot and wishing he was either 25 years older (so he wouldn't need as much money to live on for the remainder of his life) or dead.