Ask the pilot

Doubtless some of you are wondering how things might have turned out aboard United flight 93 back on Sept. 11, 2001, had the passengers successfully breached the cockpit (which, contrary to myth, they did not) and gained control. The end result, I fear, would have been roughly the same -- though you can't blame them for trying.

Anyway, without breaking topic, let's segue now over to MarketWatch.com, where columnist Chris Pummer has put together a list of the "Ten Most Overpaid Jobs in the U.S."

Yeah, you know where this is going. "Major airline pilots" makes the list at No. 9.

"While American and United pilots recently took pay cuts," Pummer begins, "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 ... for a job that technology has made almost fully automated."

I'm not sure which part of that is more egregious, the salary examples or the nonsense about automation. It's a double whammy of distorted information.

For the record, pilots at Delta suffered pay and benefit slashes on a par with those at their competitors, so I don't understand his insinuation that they are somehow in a league alone. Meanwhile, singling out the top-end salary of a few "senior captains" means almost nothing in a field of many thousands of pilots. Pummer neglects to mention that only a small fraction of them actually earn such wages and usually do so only for a short time prior to retirement. A large percentage of pilots work for many years making subpar pay in a highly unstable industry before getting the chance, later in their careers, to bring home a respectable salary.

I know, we've been through all of this before, but there's no end to allegations like Pummer's. They keep coming and coming.

My own story is fairly typical. I have been a professional pilot, beginning as a flight instructor, since 1987. Only once have I made more than $60,000 in a year, and often it has been substantially less. I've been through two airline bankruptcies, two furloughs and one complete company shutdown. (When changing carriers, salary is not transferable; one begins at the bottom again at probationary pay and benefits. At a major, that's about $30,000. At a regional, it's often under $20,000.) Things are better now, and assuming my current employer remains stable and solvent in the years ahead (by no means a sure thing), I will be lucky enough to enjoy a six-figure income. Will that make me "overpaid"?

To his credit, Pummer does point out that major-carrier pilots earn several times what their counterparts do at the regional airlines (idea for a follow-up column: "Ten Most Underpaid Jobs in U.S."), but he also states that senior pilots at low-fare companies like "JetBlue and Southwest make up to 40 percent less."

Well, they do and they don't. At United, for example, a captain of average seniority flying domestically on a narrow-body jet brings home less than an equivalent captain at Southwest or JetBlue. Granted, a United 747 captain, flying much larger equipment to cities in Asia and Europe, earns a good deal more, but there is no comparable position at Southwest or JetBlue.

But never mind salary figures for a moment. Let's pretend you're traveling from Paris to New York on an airline whose fares are dirt cheap, but whose pilots are compensated by voluntary passenger donations. A cup is passed around at the conclusion of each flight. How much is safe transport across the ocean worth to you?

In practice, it's worth about six bucks. Averaging the pay rates of the biggest airlines, the typical 777 captain makes about $190 an hour. Between Paris and New York, this captain will transport 250 passengers on a flight lasting eight hours. That hashes out to a contribution of just over $6 per passenger. The captain gets $6 of your $450 ticket. The first officer, as little as $3.

Now let's try a regional. A fifth-year CRJ-900 captain at Mesa Airlines (dba US Airways Express and other affiliations) earns $69 per flight hour. His plane has 80 seats. For a two-hour flight, you've given him $1.72. A new first officer at Mesa makes $19 an hour. On that same trip, he collects all of 47 cents from each customer.

For the year, that first officer's salary will be roughly $18,000. Don't let those hourly rates mislead you. Sixty-nine bucks an hour sounds pretty good, until you remember that crews are paid only for the time they actually fly, not the time spent on duty, at the airport preparing for departure, laying over in hotels, etc. A pilot might be on assignment for as many as 300 hours in a given month, but the average pay credit is in the vicinity of 75. This disparity is what spawns those foolish contentions that pilots "work" far less than the typical full-time employee.

No matter how you slice it, $190 an hour for that 777 skipper is an awful lot of money. But again, he or she represents a very small, very senior slice of all the pilots out there, and might only serve in that capacity for a year or two prior to retiring.

Insult to injury, Pummer finishes up with that "for a job that technology has made almost fully automated" bit. Pilots themselves are partly to blame for propagating the mythology of cockpit automation, so enamored we tend to be of our high-tech gizmos and sophisticated planes. But again, the knowledge, training and experience required to fly one of these "fully automated" jetliners are vastly more substantial than Pummer and many others would have you believe -- especially when there's a problem or emergency. That, more than anything, is what pilots are paid for -- not for the routine trip during which nothing out of the ordinary happens, but for the times when something goes wrong.

I would like to ask Chris Pummer just how much he knows about the nitty-gritty of flight deck technology. Could he tell us, please, more about these "fully automated" planes of which he speaks so casually, or was he just parroting the conventional wisdom, wrong as it is, that suggests pilots do little more than sit idly by as computers fly their planes? Almost invariably, the people who make these comments -- and they never stop coming -- have little actual knowledge of the subject.

I suggest Chris Pummer sit in on an airline training session before he next revisits this issue. For kicks, let's stick him in a 747 simulator and see how he handles a landing.

And finally, did anybody catch "20/20's" butcher job of an investigative report looking into whether cellphones can really interfere with onboard equipment?

Ugh. Let's save that one till after the holidays.

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