netjetwife said:
As you can see, you don't hit 30K until year 4. For these wages you are gone at least HALF the month. I have to laugh, albeit bitterly, at those who post here that the NJ pilots can't fight the company for a fair contract because they have few options. At these wages many jobs are available without spending ANY time away from home.
PILOTS ARE PROFESSIONALS AND SHOULD BE PAID AS SUCH
I admire your commitment, but it doesn't help your position to advertize that your husband works only 2 weeks per month. There are very few "full time" jobs in or outside aviation where your time is completely your own and untethered to the workplace 25 weeks out of the year. It's also why it takes 5 of your husbands to crew 1 aircraft over there (and the argument that he's away from home when he's working.....well, he's a pilot, and it kind of goes with the territory).
For your sake, I hope you get a liveable wage right where you're at, because if your husband had to go work for one of those high-paying NBAA corporate jobs your ASAP newbies keep comparing themselves to, you (and them) would in for a VERY rude awakening as far as what a company expects in return.
I'm not trying to be super-critical, but your position would carry more legitimate weight if you stuck to arguments that accentuate NetJets ability to pay more and convincing the owners to fund it, rather than selective/hollow comparisons and alienating other proffessional pilots.
For instance, they sound like a bunch of kids in flight school or fresh from a regional when your group claims to "work harder", basing this on hours flown per year. Hours flown? you've gotta be kidding me...in business aviation duty is duty whether you fly or sit, and plenty of corporate guys (especially the higher paid ones) have more RON's than what your husband is seeing. Availability...the status of being "ready to go" is axiomatic to "going", and why those positions are salaried in the first place....you're paid to be available. That usually means every day of the year minus vacation time and whatever one's particular flight department can work out due to crewing and forecast trips. Sorry, you don't get to block company calls half the year and 10 hours every day for the other half.
As I said before, planning your family's life around being available would be a rude awakening for you...think "Air Force wife"...and in some cases "Navy Wife". And as much as you'd like it to be, it's no secret to anyone (including your customers) that most pilots at NetJets are there for the hard time-off schedule. Just ask Diesel when he's not on his boat.
"Pilots are professionals and shoud be paid as such". In that, you mean you want more for pilots in the frac industry , which is good. But problems arise when you compain about "fairness" and use NBAA averages as the point of reference. At it's foundation, and intrinsic to that salary, is the pilot being available to the company....all the time. Taken from an NBAA member company with it's own flight department's perspective, your husband and his peers are merely part-time employees doing shift work, but receiving full-time employee benefits. That's why it takes so many of them to get the job done.
And if you meet one at a party, don't whine about "fairness of pay" to one of those NBAA-salary pilot's wives who may be driving a new SUV. Once she hears about how you didn't have to move numerous times over the years to get to that point, sell your house, set up the kids in new schools, doctors. etc etc. because your husband's company has gateways she'll probably laugh in your face because...
....she's still living the lifestyle of an Air Force wife, but with no institutional support system or structure of the military, for less pay than your husband makes, and spent many times the years of your husband's civilian work experience in famine, before she finally gets a halfway decent (and well-deserved) feast. She's more than paid her spouse-dues, and done much of it alone because he's been gone. So don't even mention about how your husband "only" gets 2 weeks off every month, known in advance, or gosh, he spends a lot of time away from home when he's working.
Tell her how bad you have it, how "unfair" it is, but I don't think she'll be all that impressed.
And sorry, but your new leaders sound like complete dips#$ts and alienate others when they compare themselves (salary-wise) to "NBAA averages" while referring to those pilots as "less-trained" and "less-safe". Your management didn't come up with that in a brochure, there's no evidence to support it, and NetJets, being a late-comer to Part 91 ops, merely met the standard for training in progress at most corporate NBAA member flight departments....ones that exceeded the FAA mandate. EJA/NJA merely lived up to what the membership did of their own volition.
So the inference that the others don't meet standards that the NBAA set themselves is not only ludicrous and further highlights the ignorance at work there, but is also insulting to those outside your own house. Your support for those leaders is support for those statement. It's pretty stupid at every level for them to make them.
