Lowering an already low bar

[stillaboo]

The real problem?

TOO MANY PILOTS. Argue all you want about it, but this is the real problem. How can this be addressed? Let's hear some ideas.

So it's a supply and demand thing, huh? Of course it is. So, the best way to lower the supply of pilots is to make the job less desireable - lower the wages, cut the benefits, increase the duty time, lower the QOL - make the opportunity cost of choosing to become a pilot too high.

There is no way to put downward pressure on the supply of pilots while making the job more desireable that I know of. So, since supply can't be helped (without concessions, which no pilot wants), we have to work the other side of the equation, and . . . stimulate demand.

Now, it seems to me that if you replace a 75 operating 3 flights a day from A to B with an RJ operating 9 times a day, you create more demand for airline pilots . . . but you lower the average wage of each individual pilot and lower the amount of 'career' jobs as dictated by the current system - the more people in the back and the heavier the plane, the more compensation you recieve.

In the current system, you have lots of low-paying jobs and few high paying jobs, and the only thing protecting the wages of the high paying jobs is the fortitude of the pilot group . . . it certainly isn't b/c there is a a supply issue. It does not bode well that many of the future mainline guys are current RJ drivers, guys who do the same work as a DL CA for 1/3 the cost, guys who bicker about who is to blame rather than how will the problem be fixed.

Fixing the problem requires pilots to value themselves more at all levels. Until pilots feel they are undervauled, they will never arrest the current slide in compensation, bene's, and QOL.

In short, it requires all pilots to change their mental outlook from "I get paid to do what I love" to "I need to be paid more to do this". For most of us who truly love to fly, this is not going to be a quick or easy process, or something we will ever do.

There is a mistique to being a pilot, an alure that is a driving force on the supply side (and the demand side to, planes are fast!). To both keep the mistique and continue to increase the QOL while subverting the forces of the supply-side quite a task indeed.

 

[Smacktard]

Talk about naive...

TOO MANY PILOTS. Argue all you want about it, but this is the real problem. How can this be addressed? Let's hear some ideas.


Until you start telling people that they are not free to choose whatever path they want in life, you cannot change this. Give it up folks, there will always be a bottom rung, and the bottom rung will always make crap for wages. Who knows, perhaps the bottom rung will always be PFT. God I hope not, but the way it's going, I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet.

 

[WhiteCloud]

With respect to all.......Until there is a union that organizes ALL pilots right on down to a single engine commercial ticket holder and good jobs continue to require thousands of hours of experience in turbine aircraft the industry will always have operators that will take advantage of the market and abuse pilots so they can get the experience needed to move on. We keep asking new hires to stop taking these jobs but won't consider them without the experience. We have to change the industry from within. The next time a contract comes up WE have to go to bat for the new hires rather than continuing to ask them to go to bat for us.

 

[100LL... Again!]

I was thinking we could raise the level of performance required to become a professional pilot.

Raise the standards far enough that "certificate mills" would not be feasible.

The level of skill and knowledge required presently to get hired at a regional is disappointingly low.

Sorry.

 

[WrightAvia]

Lear70, you must be a Democrat...

Bottom line: Your first 5 years as a qualified pilot you're going to get paid about the same to fly charter as you are to fly for a regional

Dude...I gotta call Bull Schitt on your scenarios. First of all, you are assuming an upgrade time to captain of a jet, based on the economy of three and a half years ago. Two, you are assuming everybody made the same crap wages you made in 135. Three...your time off for 135 pilots doesn't fit any of the 135 flying I have done. Four, you're forgetting compounding. While some regional guy is eatng rammien noodles during those first 5 to 7 years...I'm putting money in the bank and other investments and living a normal life with hobbies and an apartment without a bunch of stinky pilot roomies. Five...I paid 19,500 for my ratings...most of those airline cult groupies paid about 100,000 thousand, or should I say their parents did. (if not, they are paying some serious jing for their education...I paid cash for for my 141 school).

I made 32,000 the first year I flew piston twins at a pax hauling 135 operator. By the time I flew my second year there, I was making 39,000 (more senior pilots got scheduled more). The third year, I would have been flying turbine pic on salary at 45,000 a year. (I left for a ground school at XJ...silly me)

In the first six months of working for this first 135 operator, I turned down a job that paid 55,000 a year to start as SIC in a King Air 350 for a power company. They would type you in the 350 in the first 6 months and type you in their Lear 55 at the one year mark.

I work for a different 135 operator now. I get all weekends as three day weekends. I get paid holidays OFF. I don't wear a pager. I work 10 days a month and if a holiday falls on any scheduled work day but a wednesday, I get a five day weekend off.

Also...I'll never make 90K a year, but a consistant 30 to 55 a year without furloughs, goes a long way. After all, I could have wound up staying at MESABA and wished I was putting 8,000 dollars worth of guns into my gun safe this year, as opposed to paying rent by selling off guns.

 

[Lear70]

OK... my turn to call bullsh*t.

Your charter experiences are WAY outside the norm. I have about $15k in my education (in-state tuition at MTSU for my aerospace degree and all my ratings through CFII, MEI) which is pretty cheap as most go - and I'm still paying on most of it through my Stafford Loans... such is life. But after graduating from college in 1994, arguably a pretty crappy time to get into the marketplace, there weren't any jobs around to be had unless you knew someone.

After shlepping around hangars while flight instructing, I was one of the first people from the guys I went to school with to land a charter job in 1995 - flying right seat in a King Air at $75 a day, 20 days average per month, no per diem. The pay and days off has remained virtually unchanged over the last 8 years except for AN EXCEPTIONAL FEW charter outfits (four of my good friends are chief pilots at different charter outfits in Nashville, Atlanta, Orlando, and Ft. Lauderdale, not to mention I still have lunch or chat from time to time with previous employers in Nashville, New York, and Indianapolis).

I also keep my eye on the job boards (Planejobs, Climbto350, etc), and of those that list salaries or schedules with their jobs, almost all of them are BALLS ON ACCURATE with what I posted (which was copied almost verbatim from last year's NBAA salary survey), unless you want to count a day you were on call but didn't have to fly as an "off day"... in that case, I hope you're on salary instead of daily flight pay!

I'm glad you have a job that gives you EXCEPTIONAL pay and days off, but it is just that... EXCEPTIONAL, i.e. outside the norm. If you were flying for a corporate operator, I'm sure you'd be right on the money for pay and quality of life, but I bet you a c-note and a frosty beer that if you took a salary survey just from within the charter side of the house here on flightinfo, you'd find those numbers pretty accurate. Nobody's paying crap right now... that's why I'm here at Pinnacle and not back in a Lear - only about a $5k difference in pay with no guaranteed days off or pass/jumpseat priviliges. Sure, I could be making $85k a year up in Long Island, but I'd be in the next tax bracket, taking home $5k a month instead of the $3,500 I am now and spending nearly $1,000 of it on the increased cost of living with no GUARANTEED time off to enjoy it. No thanks, been there, done that, wouldn't go back unless it paid six figures and gave me guaranteed days off... which is not likely in the charter world.

Incidentally, upgrades here at Pinnacle are running about 3 years if the guys have the flight time to bid for it (3,000 total, 500 time in type) and after today's pilot meeting with the Chief Pilot and D.O. in DTW, word is that upgrades will drop into the 2 year mark and probably less by early spring for reasons I won't get into on a public board... someone else can spread the rumors.

 

[jegermeister]

An easy solution that may not be popular, would be to limit the number of new pilots each year. In effect the same thing doctors do with medical schools. Will it ever happen? I'm sure it wouldn't. But it would give us a much better position for controlling our proffesion.

 

[jarhead]

You have it backwards. Doctors don't limit the numbers getting into medical schools. Medical schools limit the number of students admited to medical school. This is done in a defacto way. There are only so many medical school seats available in the various med schools, so it becomes very competitive, where only the top scoring students can gain admitance. Are you going to establish legislation to close down FBO's with cfi's? Are you going to say, only so many can get a private license to own or rent a 172 on a weekend. No, you do not offer a simple solution. Just a bad analogy, I'm afraid.

 

[Foobar]

Require a BA and a physical fitness test to work at a regional. Now all the fat guys and folks who never went to college won't think its fair and its not. We all know you can be a fine pilot if you are a fata$$ and a BA does not really make a pilot, but.... It would narrow the pool. I suppose a masters for the major airlines would weed the pool even more.

Thats a solution. Not necessairly a fair one, but one none the less.

That is until pilots start buying degrees from online programs.... Oh wait.... never mind.

I want an online program for my ATP complete with checkride!

 

[jarhead]

Foobar

Now you're on the right track. That is doable. Of course, you would need the employer to make those requirements to be mandated. As you are aware, almost all major airlines now do require a four year degree, and even the regionals prefer it. I know a physical is needed now prior to hire, and then the flight surgeon has to pass you every six months if you're a CA, and yearly as an FO. Why do you think the airlines are not more discriminating as to who gets into the hiring pool? Do you think it might possibly be that they do not want to create a 'pilot shortage', which by the laws of supply and demand, would push up the wage cost for the hiring airline. I think the reason the majors now require a four year degree, is they want a well rounded, educated person, to present to the traveling public. You know, what kind of an image would a red neck, tobacco spitting, clone of Jethro Clampett do for the "image". Not sure Delta would want to raise the bar to hire only people with a PhD in nuclear physics. Might make them need to raise the price of the ticket to the pax, to pay for that PhD pilot.

It is really very hard to violate the laws of physics, and just about as difficult to alter the laws of supply and demand in economics. You can try to increase the demand for pilots, by lowering supply. I am not advocating it, but another way to limit supply, would be to make a pilot job un attractive by not only bad pay, but by having a lot of fatal crashes killing lots of pilots. But wait, that might also limit the number of paying pax too. Then the revenue stream dries up, and there is no money to pay the pilot a decent wage(tic) Same dilemma I guess.

 

[100LL... Again!]

How about if we dial it up a notch on the technical evaluation/interview.

Let's make it something that a student from a certificate mill would not be able to pass.

Who could possibly be against that? Other than those who would not make the cut, of course.

Any idiot can get a 4 year degree. Let's base hiring on something meanigful - like skills and knowledge in [I[aviation[/I].

Those of you with skills and knowledge shouldn't have a problem with this. The screams will come from the wanna-be's.

Flame away.

 

[Lear70]

Why not just keep it simple - the same thing you see at most majors. 4-year degree from an accredited university, an ATP, then a sim check in a full-motion Level D EFIS sim including a V1 cut and a hand-flown single-engine ILS down to 200 and 1/2. It wouldn't be pretty and they wouldn't know ALL the right procedures, but as long as they kept it in the ballpark and didn't paint it red, they get to join us?

 

[100LL... Again!]

So those of us who could only afford a two-year degree can go screw ourselves, no matter how well we can fly?

Other than that, it sounds like a good idea. I think that "ballpark" is not good enough.


Here's what I would like to see:

100 question written test on all aspects of aviation an ATP should know. Icing. Windshear. Aerodynamics. Regulations.

Board-type interview, with particular emphasis on the person's knowledge of their previous job. Aircraft systems, Ops Specs, etc.

Sim ride with a non-normal loft-type scenario. It is not fair to evaluate someone too harshly in an unfamiliar sim. How about a diversion situation, or an approach that isn't your typical monkey-can-fly-it ILS? Make the dtermination based on their basic flying skills and decision-making skills.


If we start raising the bar on the performance we expect from ourselves, the wanna-be's will be filtered out (or forced to up their skills/knowledge). This will reduce the labor pool and increase pay. Limiting the supply is the only way. Arbitrary factors like college degrees, eyesight, etc, can thin the pool, but it has no bearing on fitness for the position.

 

[pilotyip]

raise age

Require a Masters or Phd to apply, and raise the age of the ATP to say 45, that would really cut down the supply. This is effective as all the others solutions offered here, the supply and demand baby that is all it is. BTW right 100 LL, 4 yr degree has nothing to do with flying an airplane.

 

[100LL... Again!]

I think my point is a little more realistic.

How about requiring an ATP for ANY airline position?