You always make these ridiculous arguments. How about a 63 year old with early onset Alzheimer's or a 47 year old marathon runner?
Jim Fix, Marathon Runner, fitness guru, fatal hearth attack atage 52. Your point is? We are going to use averages when we may have better tools available to determine who is a health risk in the cocpkit beyone just picking an age. Lets come up with a skill test.
Give tests that will determine a higher probability of no in-flight incapacity . Better than a simple; lets pick an age. Remember there are a number of recorded in-flight incapacitation’s with pilots in their ages in the 40's and 50's. I still believe the push for a lower age is more of an economic issue with many and the safety flag is being waived. Because after all, who can be against safety?
There was a also a growing experience shortage amongst new hire pilots in the fall of 2007. That may have been a factor in extending the age.
Don't think so, our starting salary in the DA-20 was $36K per year, and the DC-9 $38K/yr, the highest in our sector of the industry, and almost double the regional starting pay. This high pay was evenually something the company could not maintain in a declining market.
We were a bottom feeder, but I think and many wil lecho this the best of the bottom feeders. A place you came and paid your dues so you could move on to a career position. You are trying to confuse us with a career position. Our pilots with to DAL, UAL, NJ, AT, Spirit, FedEx, and a dozen others. I take emense satisfaction in the success I had mentoring a group of new hires and turning them into true aviation professional. Some elected to stay here becasue they were making so much money they could not go back to the starting pay even at major. USA Jet was the finest DA-20 operator in the business. Our training programs were good enough to train anyone who had basic flying skills. USA Jet did all of its training under Part 121 N & O; the DA-20 had 5 weeks of full time ground school prior to starting sim training, which ran one week and 25 hours for F/O's. All DA-20 F/O's received 25 hours of supervised IOE prior to being released to line operations, we observe 100 min time in seat for pairing restrictions and in the past have turned down trips because of only low time pairs available. USA Jet had not hired a Captain off the street since 1998. We have had pilots go to major airlines and tell us, except for fancy bells and whistles, the USA Jet training was as good as they got at their major. DA-20 maintenance was conducted under Part 121, crews were not forced to fly what they considered unsafe airplanes, and a pilot could write up anything and put it in the logbook. We had been inspected many times by both the FAA and outside audit companies, they came away with the same findings: USA Jet was one of the finest operations they had ever seen. We did it right and stood by our standards which went well beyond that required by the FAR’s. While in full time ground school pilots were paid full pay of $35 K per year to start. We have program on track for 6-figure pay in 6 years for all Captains. 10 hard days off every 28-day bid period. We established the policy of hard days off and gave the pilot the option of being flown home or getting additional pay for selling their days. No training contract was required, if you did not want to work for us, we would let you go. We had a very low turnover and the pilot who left went to better jobs. We had the highest guaranteed pay of any on-demand operator flying DA-20 sized equipment. We introduced more days off, increased pay, and hard days off to the on-demand industry. Our completion had to match us in order to attract pilots. We raised the bar. All of this excellent came with a cost and its was cost not being carried by our competition, in the end we were not competitive in the on-demand business. When your primary business is automotive just in line airlift, the last couple years was a bad time to be in business. Flights down 90% since 2000. BTW at union air carrier across the field, a L-188 F/O started at $32K/yr, so we were paying more than the union carriers in our sector.
Yes and your point is? That is why so many of our pilots went to NJ, but they had to start someplace.
