Pilot salaries

[English]

Commercial airline pilots and navigators pull down an average of $113.82 an hour — a high-flying $236,745.60 annually, based on an extrapolated 40-hour week.

I heard this same thing on the news this morning.

They just don't get that pilots don't fly 40 hours a week.

 

[FraxJockey]

Wsj

Evidently the Wall street Journal published a similar article:

Can everyone send the WSJ a nasty e-mail pls....
[email protected]

WSJ Reporting on Pilot Salaries Flies in the Face of Reality​

Despite ALPA's efforts to point out the flaws in recent Bureau of Labor Statistics information on pilot salaries, a prominent story on the report appears in The Wall Street Journal, pointing to pilots as "winners" among wage earners. Capt. Duane Woerth submitted the following letter, condemning the Journal’s inaccurate reporting and failure to present deep, fundamental concerns about the BLS data in its coverage of the government report.

The Wall Street Journal

Letter to the Editor

The Air Line Pilots Association is outraged with The Wall Street Journal’s lack of responsible reporting in its recent article on pilot salaries ("Wage Winners and Losers," Sept. 13). The article did a grave disservice to the thousands of pilots who have sacrificed billions in salary concessions and billions in lost pensions, not to mention the thousands of pilots currently furloughed and those who have lost their jobs and benefits completely.

In our conversation with the reporter, the Air Line Pilots Association provided clear and unequivocal evidence that serious questions exist concerning the Bureau of Labor Statistics data and how the study was conducted. These questions remain unresolved despite repeated calls to the agency.

Along with expressing these concerns in the strongest terms, we also stated the need to accurately report the unresolved questions surrounding the data. We provided the following quote to your reporter, "We're unclear how the government could have come up with numbers that show an increase. This study flies in the face of the reality that pilots are working more hours while taking substantial pay cuts, losing some or all of their pensions, and paying more for health care."

Regarding pilot work hours, the BLS data only reflects time spent actually flying. It does not include the additional time spent on pre- and post-flight activities, waiting at an airport for the next assigned flight, training, etc. Using the BLS definition, news reporters only work a few hours a week--the time they are actually on the air or at their keyboards writing their stories. This method is a gross distortion of the reality of pilot working hours.

Not only did The Wall Street Journal cover an extremely controversial study without performing due diligence as to how it was conducted, your paper failed to acknowledge the questions surrounding it. This article falls far below your paper’s standards.

Capt. Duane E. Woerth
President

 

[PAPA FOX!]

From today's New York Post -- so it must be true ...

$KY-HIGH FLIERS
​

By NEIL GRAVES

September 14, 2005 -- After kids gets over their fantasies of becoming baseball players or ballerinas, responsible parents ought to point them to the real money — being an airline pilot.

Based on the Department of Labor's recently released occupational compensation survey for 2004, the fliers pull in more bucks per year than any other job category.

Commercial airline pilots and navigators pull down an average of $113.82 an hour — a high-flying $236,745.60 annually, based on an extrapolated 40-hour week.

They are not the highest earners per year, a distinction that goes to tweedy economics professors. Due to high demand, they tend to work year-round and pile up cash at a rate of $63.98 hourly for 40-plus hours a week.

But pilots rarely get close to that number, since regulations limit their work week to considerably fewer than 40 hours.

Even teaching at good old state college has become surprisingly lucrative for econ profs, accounting for more than half of the top 10 occupations in the survey.

Part of that result is due to the fact that the survey rated hourly employees only, discounting business owners such as doctors in private practice. Even so, doctors who are employees came in third at $57.90 an hour.

"One of the things about doctors that brings them down [on the list] is we pick up a lot of residents, and doctors in a private practice aren't employees," said Wayne Shelly, a Department of Labor spokesman.

"That's also true of lawyers," he added. Which explains why the average law professor earns more than an actual lawyer — by about $9 an hour, $57.05 compared to $48.60. The national average wage was $18.09 an hour, said the survey, details of which were first reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Less startlingly, the lower end of the pay scale is occupied by service industry employees. At $7.69 an hour, bellhops and porters are fifth from the bottom, while bartenders are a notch lower at $6.71.

At the very bottom rungs are busboys, at $6, and waiters and waitresses at a how-low-can-you-go $4.44.

"That seems a little high, it's lower, usually," said Ari Leonia, a waiter at Heartland Brewery in Times Square. "Usually it's between $2 and $4. It doesn't matter much, we never see it anyway. It goes right to taxes. We make it up with tips."

Regionally, the survey showed America's best-paid employees are in the Pacific states, at $20.70 an hour, followed by the Middle Atlantic states (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey), at $20.59.

At the bottom are workers in the south. In the Department of Labor's sub-region of Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama, the average hourly wage totaled $14.49.

Additional reporting by Perry Chiaramonte

You posted this in the wrong forum. This ought to be in the YGBSM forum!!!

 

[ce750drvr]

I heard this same thing on the news this morning.

They just don't get that pilots don't fly 40 hours a week.

Well, duty time is still "work", so.....

My last tour was 5 days......

Day 1: 14 hours
Day 2: 13.5 hours
Day 3: 12.5 hours
Day 4: 14 hours
Day 5: 13 hours

Compared to their 40 hour work week, I actually "worked" or "on duty" a total of....

67 hours. The goverment has limited us on how many hours we actually fly because they know that there is other duty time plus flying. If they didn't, it would be disasterous.

On a 17 day schedule, if I average 12 hours a day of duty, that comes to 204 hours a month. At a normal 9 to 5 job, for a month (30 days), you work 196 hours a month and that is being generous. Legally, the company can work us 14 hours a day, that would come to 238 hours a month. So we work a full day to a full week more a month than the normal job.

To go even further, we could realistically work 12 days to 12.5 weeks more than the normal job. I know this is boring, but the reality is, we do work a lot.


Edited after I went back and read through the other posts.

English, due to your avatar, I thought you were njadsptchr. Sorry 'bout that.