Pilots in the job market--

[semperfido]

A RISING TIDE SHOULD LIFT ALL BOATS

.

you must watch "MadMoney" too...it's one of Cramers favorite sayings

 

[Diesel]

I read the AIN editorial. I'll have to go look at it. I especially liked how he pointed out that most pax riding in the back of fractional aircraft got their money through illegal means.

I'll have to go look for it.

 

[Hogprint]

HEy Hog, I think it was already on the company site.

Some dip weeny ceo talking a bunch of crap about his having flown a million hours and blah blah blah.

MAybe it was even here that I saw it.

Oh, it was that screed...that was months ago it seems? He seemed pretty bitter. He must have been sold off! Probably thought he was too important for a sell off!

 

[pilotyip]

There is shortage of pilots on the lower end of the food chain, recruiting, pool turnover and hiring are starting to look like the pre-911 times. Presently also everyone of the on-demand operators in looking for pilts and this is in the slow season of the year. Fortunely we are in pretty good shape due to low turnover and have had no problems filling our classes.

 

[pilotyip]

This is repeat of an old post, but it fits here. This is a pilot board so saying anything in defense of management is like peeing into the wind, that it is going to come back to you. CEO's are not intentionally running airlines into the ground. They would very much like to succeed. For lack of other reason it would make their resume look great, they would be doing something no other CEO had ever done. Top management includes many besides the CEO, the CEO sets direction as requested by the board. The CEO has little control over the airline, the airline is run by regulation and union contracts. They are at the mercy of the purchasing public, who with Internet access has made the airline ticket a perfectly elastic commodity. There is little they can do inside their structure. Other high paid top management personnel, in Operations, Maintenance. Marketing, Legal, Finance, etc. have unique skills in dealing with large organizations. This makes them marketable when shopping for a job, unlike pilots whose skills are nearly universal. An issue of ATW in the last year had an article about “Airline Management a dying breed”, the article basically said no one wants to do it. The good track record CEO’s are going to other industries. With tremendous, payrolls, overhead burdens, and extremely low margins, there is no tried and true path to success. Most have tried to increase market share, but this has lead to low price and ridiculous breakeven load factors in 95% range. What is management supposed to do? Eliminating management will bring the end quicker for the airplane industry, and their salaries are insignificant to the airlines operating costs. Without management you could not operate the airline, The FAA would shut it down without approved Part 119 key management. Would the pilots step up and become management for free in their spare time. Why is every time, pilot salaries come up, they are immediately compared to top management. I saw an article in ATW in the 2002 that stated at DAL there were 17 members of top management made more than the top DAL Captain. The combined top 17 salaries equaled less than 1/6 of 1% of the combined pilot salaries. If management worked for free all pilots in the company would get a 1/10 of 1% raise. (for a $100K per year pilot that would be $3/wk increase in take home) Boy that raise would really make the pilot group happy. Top management possesses skills that allow them to move from job to job and command high salaries. And every one of these managers wants to see his/her airline prosper. They just can not do it. Are they paid too much? maybe, should they be paid more than pilots? how are you going to attract a good CEO at pilot wages?

 

[ozpilot]

Heres the AIN Article:

UNIONS ARE DETRIMENTAL TO FRACTIONAL INDUSTRY
Editor:
I am tired of AIN's coverage of the ongoing saga regarding IBT 1108 versus Netjets' management. Thank goodness the dispute is settled for now, but the pilot grousing issue won't go away.
No one forced these pilots to go to work for Netjets, and if the deal and working conditions are so bad, they should resign. If no pilots are available to replace them, I guess Netjets will have to soften the work rules for the available pool of pilots. However, I don't think that is the case.
I have more than a million air miles under my belt and, from my perspective, the same people who in no small part brought us the collapse of the major airlines will execute the identical slow-death routine on the fractional industry. This collective attitude will eventually destroy one of the better things to come along to rejuvenate business aviation and will make already hideous costs even more so.
Obviously, some of the passengers Netjets carries run public companies as personal-enrichment fiefdoms instead of for the benefit of their shareholders. Other passengers are just rich-either through earnings, inheritance or illegal means. I suspect that in some perverse way, these union flight crews justify their money and work-rule demands as a kind of a latter-day, union-enforced and mandated noblesse oblige. How disingenuous.
Samuel Kephart, CEO
Virtual Acumen
Spearfish, S.D.

 

[GVFlyer]

This is repeat of an old post, but it fits here. This is a pilot board so saying anything in defense of management is like peeing into the wind, that it is going to come back to you. CEO's are not intentionally running airlines into the ground. They would very much like to succeed. For lack of other reason it would make their resume look great, they would be doing something no other CEO had ever done. Top management includes many besides the CEO, the CEO sets direction as requested by the board. The CEO has little control over the airline, the airline is run by regulation and union contracts. They are at the mercy of the purchasing public, who with Internet access has made the airline ticket a perfectly elastic commodity. There is little they can do inside their structure. Other high paid top management personnel, in Operations, Maintenance. Marketing, Legal, Finance, etc. have unique skills in dealing with large organizations. This makes them marketable when shopping for a job, unlike pilots whose skills are nearly universal. An issue of ATW in the last year had an article about “Airline Management a dying breed”, the article basically said no one wants to do it. The good track record CEO’s are going to other industries. With tremendous, payrolls, overhead burdens, and extremely low margins, there is no tried and true path to success. Most have tried to increase market share, but this has lead to low price and ridiculous breakeven load factors in 95% range. What is management supposed to do? Eliminating management will bring the end quicker for the airplane industry, and their salaries are insignificant to the airlines operating costs. Without management you could not operate the airline, The FAA would shut it down without approved Part 119 key management. Would the pilots step up and become management for free in their spare time. Why is every time, pilot salaries come up, they are immediately compared to top management. I saw an article in ATW in the 2002 that stated at DAL there were 17 members of top management made more than the top DAL Captain. The combined top 17 salaries equaled less than 1/6 of 1% of the combined pilot salaries. If management worked for free all pilots in the company would get a 1/10 of 1% raise. (for a $100K per year pilot that would be $3/wk increase in take home) Boy that raise would really make the pilot group happy. Top management possesses skills that allow them to move from job to job and command high salaries. And every one of these managers wants to see his/her airline prosper. They just can not do it. Are they paid too much? maybe, should they be paid more than pilots? how are you going to attract a good CEO at pilot wages?

Good post pilotyip. You've explained in excellent detail why each of the legacy airlines must go through bankruptcy to restructure costs.

GV






~

 

[GEXDriver]

NetjetWife

Yes, the article had been posted on the NJ board. Semore paraphrased it very well.

When you add in their family members, that's a lot of lives that have been impacted in a positive way!
Let's not forget that once the momentum is under way, change becomes easier.

A RISING TIDE SHOULD LIFT ALL BOATS

Paddling, however, is required. Man the oars! Or cards........in this case.

You don't know yet if organized labor's increase of Netjet's operating costs will have the same effect it did on the airlines. It is particularly difficult to judge because the fractional industry is not yet a mature business and, at least according to SEC fillings, has never turned a profit.

You're words of today may come to be regarded much like United's ALPA chief Rick Dubinsky's 2000 statement, "We don't want to kill the golden goose. We just want to choke it by the neck until it gives us every last egg."

 

[FLYLOW22]

God forbid a pilot is allowed to make a career earning by just flying an airplane and not having 2 or 3 more fast food jobs on the side.

The $99 coast to coast biz model for the ailines is so far from broken that it is unfixable. Government subsidy is the only way to go from here... or we can trudge on to complete and utter meltdown as well.

As far as comparisons between the Frax industry and the 121 debacle... we don't strangle the Golden Goose... we fly it around. The Golden Goose is not going anywhere and enjoys the product that we deliver. NJA is not a Golden Goose. They are a middleman. If costs rise, the middleman gets to keep less. THe middlemanis not happy about that fact, hence the resistence towards labor to achieve livable wages. The middleman lost.

The middleman will continue to make money hand over fist and bury it between the sheets so that the world cannot follow it but who cares? We know that the amount of money being poured intot he machine vs. what is coming out is such a disparity that that idea of even worrying about where the money went hasn't even surfaced to our top 100 questions. We know the middleman can afford it.

Our 6's were not unreachable. Our goals were not outrageous. We achieved what we did because we sought reasonable expectations and did not settle for POSTA offers.

The pilots of NJA are not interested in the Labor/Management games. We are interested in taking care of our Owners and our families. The rest is ball bearings.

 

[GEXDriver]

As far as comparisons between the Frax industry and the 121 debacle... we don't strangle the Golden Goose... we fly it around. The Golden Goose is not going anywhere and enjoys the product that we deliver. NJA is not a Golden Goose. They are a middleman. If costs rise, the middleman gets to keep less. THe middlemanis not happy about that fact, hence the resistence towards labor to achieve livable wages. The middleman lost.

The middleman will continue to make money hand over fist and bury it between the sheets so that the world cannot follow it but who cares? We know that the amount of money being poured intot he machine vs. what is coming out is such a disparity that that idea of even worrying about where the money went hasn't even surfaced to our top 100 questions. We know the middleman can afford it.

Nice rhetoric, but virtually meaningless. Netjets operates in a niche market with no pricing power. The middleman has to stay in business for you to have a job. Your job is much closer to the airline model than the corporate one. You produce required revenue for your company to stay in business, we don't. You have a very expensive operating model which has not yet shown that it can be profitable. You man at four to five pilots per airframe, where corporate mans at three pilots or less. Up to 50% of your flying can be deadhead and therefore non productive. Average aircraft usage for corporate is about 450 hours per year; with your card programs you can fly each airplane over 1200 hours a year thereby decreasing the value of the owners asset at a much accelerated rate.

You are also apparently alleging that Bershire Hathaway is falsifying their Security and Exchange Commission filings, in which case you're lost anyways as your senior leadership will be going to Club Fed.