If everyone hates their airline why not quit

[EOpilot]

Wow, I think we agree WAY more than we disagree on this issue.

For the record, I wasn't referring to the National Seniority List solution. Like you said, all that would do is punish those who work for a well run airline.

My rough solution is to take pay and retirement out of the equation. Your pay would be dependant on how many years you have been flying in the guild and what seat and equipment you are flying.

Your schedule, equipment, seat, and furlough order would still be controlled by your company seniority.

Now, say you've worked for 10 years at airline X and it goes belly-up. Instead of starting at zero at a new company, you would start at 10 year pay. However, while you were a captain flying A320s before, now you are an FO flying an MD80. Your pay <i>will</i> decrease and you won't be able to hold a line for a while, but at least you won't lose your retirement and your pay will be comparable to what you were making before when you can upgrade.

The big question is hiring. How to keep a company from hiring less seasoned pilots to save on payroll, and the only answer I can think of is to require that hiring be done out of a communal pool. Longest service gets picked first. And entry into the guild can only be accomplished when the pool is empty, or everybody bypasses.

Again, I don't think this will ever happen, and if it did, it would require government intervention to get it started. A better time for it would have been at the moment of deregulation, but that time is past. I just think that the cyclical pattern of the industry is irrelevant to the decline of the profession. Pilot jobs are thin, and there are more pilots out there than ever. Any startup can decimate the industry without a care in the world since after their bankruptcy the officers still go home with fat checking accounts.

I'm just using my current point-of-view as an outsider to find a way to make your fallback job less of a necessity. Trust me, sometimes the fallback really sucks.

 

[BLing]

I think that it is our nature as pilots and airline employees to b!tch. I remember my days working for two different regionals (furloughed by the first) as a Ramp/Gate agent, I was always complaining, and wanting to quit. I never could bring my self to quit for some reason. I worked my a$$ off for 3 years showing up at 0430 or staying past midnight and almost never having a weekend off. I finally quit my job in september to relocate for a CFI job, it was one of the saddest days of my life. To make a long story short, this industry is in our blood and we all truly love it and could not work anywhere else despite all the BS!

 

[Cokie907]

Ok....my 2 cents, whiskey tango foxtrot....

I'm just another RJ pilot, been at PCL for 5 years and have hated almost every minute of it. Of course, I love to fly (own a Weedhopper ultralight) and I have some great times in the cockpit with fellow pilots. But this doesn't make up for being single with no kids at 39 and feeling disconnected from my community here in East Tennessee.

In July, I experienced a bulging disc in my lumbar vertebrae which eventually herniated. Make a long story short, I've been out of the cockpit for 4 months after epidural injections, surgery and physical therapy.

I thought these 4 months were to recuperate my back but what I realized is that my mind was what ended up healing the most! I realized that I've been missing out on life by being on the road 18 days a month and after this back injury, I truly value each year of good health.

I also realized that I do not miss flying. When I quit flying from a night freight job in 1996, it tore me apart but not this time. Not sure why, perhaps it is because now I've flown every kind of aviation venue in every altitude regime. There's nothing left to check off anywhere on the "to do list".

This injury has put me in the hole financially after 4 months of no income and plenty of medical bills. After I square up my finances and find a suitable job in the real world, my resignation from flying is going in. Its a miserable industry and without partial re-regulation, it will only get worse.