Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
The pilot loses his patience with ignorant reporters who blame airline bankruptcies on useless, overpaid captains.
Nov 21, 2003 | I approach my online mailbox with a degree of fear and loathing these days. The minute I feel some hotly contentious issue has been adequately doused with reason (or at least outrage), the letters roll in pointing me to this or that sequel taking flame in some corner of the Web.
Just when I had nothing more to say about airport security, along comes Nathaniel Heatwole to rekindle our idiotic pointy-object fixation. Just when I'd finished ranting about stupidly named airlines, United unveils an alter-ego abomination named "Ted." And so forth.
This time the subject is pilot salaries, one of the more aggravatingly revisited topics in the Ask the Pilot archives. Months ago, after threatening to martyr (and humiliate) myself by publishing copies of my past W-2s on Salon, I assumed I'd put the myth of the overpaid and underproductive pilot to rest. Not so fast. Several of you were observant enough -- perhaps cruel is the choicer word -- to refer me to a pair of recent articles.
The first and more egregious of the two was a Nov. 6 article by Chris Pummer of CBSMarketWatch.com. Pummer awarded airline pilots the number nine position in his list of the "Ten Most Overpaid Jobs in the U.S."
"While American and United pilots recently took pay cuts, senior captains earn as much as $250,000 a year at Delta, and their counterparts at other major airlines still earn about $150,000 to $215,000 -- several times pilot pay at regional carriers -- for a job that technology has made almost fully automated. By comparison, senior pilots make up to 40 percent less at low-fare carriers like Jet Blue [sic] and Southwest, though some enjoy favorable perks like stock options. That helps explain why their employers are profitable while several of the majors are still teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. The pilot unions are the most powerful in the industry. They demand premium pay as if still in the glory days of long-gone Pan Am and TWA, rather than the cutthroat, deregulated market of under-$200 coast-to-coast roundtrips. Because we entrust our lives to them, consumers accept the excessive sums paid them, when it's airplane mechanics who really hold our fate in their hands."
At the close of his story, he finishes with, "If only we were all so fortunate." Indeed, I could use some of that largesse myself.
After reading the article, I extinguished my cigar, put aside my martini and stepped from the Jacuzzi, handing my waterproof titanium laptop to Carlos, who immediately began wiping my feet with a white hand towel. "Penelope!" I bellowed. "Bring me my robe, and take a letter!"
I proceeded to ask Pummer why he, like so many others who've penned similar apocryphals of populist outrage, chooses the "senior captain" as stock representative of the airline pilot.
Senior captains make up less than 25 percent of a typical seniority list, and are a small fraction of all the airline pilots out there. Only half of an airline's pilots are captains at all, never mind the senior kind. And is Pummer aware that that 10,000 major-airline pilots are currently out of work, the majority having never hit a six-figure salary, or close to it, in their professional lives?
A survey might tell you that a fifth-year first officer (copilot) at a major earns roughly $120 per hour. Amazing, you think, until you realize he is legally capped at 1,000 flight hours per year, a mark that's rarely met. And those 85 monthly hours or so -- 19 per week if you must -- are the tip of the on-the-job iceberg. When paid hourly, as most are, a pilot has not punched in, so to speak, till the moment his plane is pushed from the gate, and is off the clock the moment he docks at destination. Not generally accounted for are the hundreds of ancillary hours spent in hotels, between flights, taking care of paperwork, cooking ramen noodles and so forth.
And no small number of pilots, I should add, will retire as first officers, not captains. When the industry shrinks or stagnates, as is happening today, there is little forward movement within the ranks.
Pummer has not, as of yet, responded.
Even more misleading than his citation of only the highest-end salaries -- and I give him credit for reminding us of the disparity between regional and mainline pay -- is the remark about cockpit automation. Pummer's flippant comment that a pilot's job is "almost fully automated" speaks absolutely nothing to the knowledge, training and experience required before an airman masters the console of a new Airbus or Boeing. And while not to disparage the fine and crucial work of the industry's maintenance workers, his contention that mechanics are the ones who "really hold our fate in their hands" is about the most blatantly disingenuous thing I've ever read.
It's the old joke about pilots falling asleep or reading the paper while the machine flies itself around the country or across the ocean. One is tempted to envision a comfy chair and a cup holder set before a switch marked "takeoff/land."
If I may pluck from an old column: Chatting gate-side with a frequent flyer, a pilot hears, "But do you really do anything? Doesn't the autopilot do all the flying?" A week from now, when you're visiting friends and family for the holiday and somebody has laid out an elaborate Thanksgiving dinner, try this: "But did you really do anything? Doesn't the oven do all the cooking, while you sit on the couch watching football or sipping a pre-dinner cocktail?
An automated flight deck makes a pilot's job easier the way high-tech medical equipment helps a surgeon at his job. Have a look up front at a state-of-the-art airliner and tell me if "easy" or "fully automated" is what comes to mind.
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