Ask the pilot

Singing the airplane pilot workingman blues.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Airplanes, Airlines, Business, Airports, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

Feb. 17, 2006 | On Feb.1, United Airlines emerged from more than 37 months under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. United was and remains the largest transportation entity ever to file for court protection. Tainting the emergence was word of an estimated $300 million reward package to be split among 400 company executives. This after workers' pensions had been terminated, salaries and benefits reduced drastically. "To be sure," editorialized USA Today, "these executives took a ponderous, money-losing airline, pared it back, and reintroduced it as a company with a fighting chance. But that feat was built on slashing labor costs." Even the pages of Air Transport World, a magazine not known to opine sympathetically toward labor, couldn't help throwing out a barb, noting that the management stock award had originally been twice the agreed-to amount before angry creditors and employees got wind of it. ATW gave United a mock "Greed Is Good Award."

Since the Chapter 11 filing in December 2002, United has spent $324 million in consulting fees and other assistance with its reorganization, according to the Rocky Mountain News. The paper calculated that amount to be equivalent to 10,451 flight attendant salaries for a year.

How many pilot salaries that equates to wasn't specified, but based on first-year pay scales, the number is roughly the same. Dividing $324 million by 10,451 gives you $31,000 per year, which is a typical salary for new-hire pilots at any large airline, not just United. If anything, it's a tad high. At United specifically, cockpit crewmembers now earn about 40 percent less than they did three years ago, with a 20 percent increase in work hours -- not to mention the evisceration of their pension plan and the cutting of benefits across the board.

Welcome to the glamorous, lucrative world of piloting. While not to ignore the pains of the many other workers who've been asked to make sacrifices over the past several years, both inside and outside the airline business, a look at the tribulations of pilots is interesting and revealing. Despite the carnage imposed on collective bargaining agreements of late, many myths and misconceptions about pilot earnings continue to circulate.

Fast Company magazine actually included "airline pilot" on its list of "The 25 Top Jobs for 2005." "Airline jobs pay in the six figures," says the magazine. That one that had me spurting coffee over my keyboard.

Well, they do, some of them, but that's a bit like saying that acting jobs pay in the eight figures, just because a small minority of actors are lucky enough to become stars. Be cautious of sources citing "average" salaries. Those averages might pertain only to captains, or only to pilots employed by the major carriers. Along with these dollar values often comes the implication that they're obscene or undeserved, failing to explain that a given pilot is liable to be in his late 50s by the time he earns that fourth stripe and a respectable income, after a lifetime of slogging it out for nothing pay and possibly enduring years of furlough. A pilot's early and mid-career struggles, and the fact that many (or most) of them never make it to a major airline at all, aren't routinely quantified in the bullet-point salary rankings.

Another thing to be leery of are quotes of hourly pay rates. While it's true that most pilots are compensated by the hour, those are flight hours, not "work" hours as most people think of them. Those hourly totals might seem outlandish, but they are engineered to account for the off-the-clock ancillaries of the job: preflight planning, downtime between flights, and periods laying over in hotels. Only a fraction of a typical multi-day assignment is spent in the air. Over the course of a month, perhaps 75-80 hours of actual flight are recorded, but a pilot might be on the road for upwards of three weeks.

At airlines, where the seniority system rules all, raises -- along with upgrades from first officer to captain -- are based on length of tenure and little or nothing else. Increases come annually, and modestly. An eighth-year first officer at United now grosses approximately $85,000. Perhaps that doesn't sound terribly unreasonable for a position with a large corporation, but you have to consider the typical career path endured by the typical pilot before he or she achieves such level of tenure. In the United States, aviators do not begin their careers with major airlines, where the average age of new hires is somewhere between 35 and 40. In other words, you could be 42, 48, or even 50 years old before bringing home that $85,000.

Prior to that, a civilian-trained pilot faces long stretches of de facto apprenticeship, usually flying regional planes. And prior to that, he or she probably built time as a flight instructor, teaching doctors to fly Cessnas for eight bucks an hour, or in some other entry-level capacity for next-to-nothing wages. And prior to that, he or she needed to amass the requisite FAA licenses and ratings to become employable in the first place.

(We'll mostly stick with civilian ranks for the purposes of this discussion. Civilians account for close to half of all airline pilots and represent the bulk of those now being hired. Military fliers frequently have the comfort of armed services pensions, and they are often -- though certainly not always, as we'll see later -- able to bypass most entry-level stints once in the job market.)

As we speak, pilot recruitment is in fact robust, but the majority of openings are at the regionals, where new-hire pay (at the helm of a $20-plus million Embraer or Canadair) is in the vicinity of $16,000-$22,000. Between a quarter and a third of all airline pilots are working at regional carriers, and the percentage is going up. A senior captain at United and a junior first officer at United Express are airline pilots just the same -- indeed one can argue the latter has the more challenging position -- but the captain's salary might exceed the first officer's by a factor of 10.

And don't forget, there is no sideways transfer of pay or skills. A laid-off crewmember from United, Delta or Northwest is free to fly elsewhere, but must begin again as a junior copilot at probationary pay and benefits. In America, around 5,000 airline pilots remain on indefinite furlough status from the biggest airlines (and some of the small ones too). For understandable reasons, not too many of these out-of-work airmen are champing at the bit for a chance to start from scratch at a regional.

At Mesaba Airlines, a Northwest Airlink affiliate founded in 1944, pilot compensation now begins at $21,000 per year. (For flight attendants, it's $14,000; for mechanics, $27,000.) Average base pay for all Mesaba pilots, captains and first officers together, is roughly $48,000. Crewmembers and union representatives have been holding informational picketing recently, as management has put forth a Section 1113c motion in an attempt to nullify its pilots' contract. With its parent company, Northwest, now in Chapter 11, Mesaba wants to chop wages 19 percent and impose a 60 percent increase in health insurance premiums. Apparently $21,000 is an untenable expenditure for a highly skilled technical position.

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