Racing to the bottom.
When margins are high, a company can afford to be kind to its employees. Think of nap stations at
Google and free lunches at Facebook.
Airlines suffer from about the lowest margins in any industry. Once an SLF has decided on the class
he can afford, it is simply a matter of finding the lowest fare. Since he knows travel by air is a
horrible experience, he certainly will not want to overpay for it. (Only a handful of airlines have
a reputation that warrants a slight premium, but some of them seem to be working hard to lose
it.) In any event, fierce competition leads inexorably to the so-called race to the
bottom.
But one has to take care what motives one ascribes to airline management. Contrary to popular
belief, managers are not hatchet-wielding robots. They have kids and lives, and go on their
vacations by air. They were not born with an innate compulsion to cut costs.
It is almost certainly the case that your typical airline manager (and senior executive, too) would
like to increase training time for pilots. So why don't they just do it? The most important issue
for management is not the absolute cost of an input into their system, but the relative cost of that
input, "relative" meaning compared to their competitors. The race is not so much to the "bottom",
but to the level set out in the "rules". No manager could possibly progress in his company if he
incurred costs greater than the rules permit. If competing airlines do not have to do more than the
rules require, why should we?
Blaming the airlines is not a solution for inadequate training. The solution is to change the
rules. Surprising as it might seem, companies often don't complain (very hard, anyway) about a change in the rules, just as long as it affects their competitors equally.
Something similar is happening right now at the ICAO meetings in Montreal. Regulators from around
the world are trying to reach a consensus on minimum experience for flight crew. At present, the
only yardstick is total time. The huge benefit of using that yardstick is that it is so easy to
measure. The regulators are looking hard for a better yardstick, that takes into account the
"quality" of the hours, or the conditions under which they were earned, and so on. If the regulators
succeed, their consensus will become the new rule/bottom towards which all airlines will gravitate.
Setting new rules is a political issue, whether the rules apply at the national level or the
international level.
YYZjim
PS. A poster in a related forum described how Boeing fired a group of senior engineers, telling them
their skills weren't needed any longer because the business of making airplanes had become a mature
business. Mature businesses control their costs with care, and also race down to the rules/bottom.
In fact, that pretty much sums up the basic problem with the MAX. Boeing designed it to meet the
rules, and not one little bit more. In my opinion, Boeing is wrong to think their business is mature.
Their airplanes may produce a commodity -- air travel -- but the airplanes themselves are not a
commodity.