Sitting inside a shiny new jet = great pilot. = great honour. = pax and CC line up to throw rose petals at your feet as you strut down the airbridge to mount your stallion.
It’s this vivid imagination of too many pilots’s mentalities and misplaced feelings of self worth which is cheerfully being exploited by management. That’s why they have MBAs and we struggle to do an easy crossword.
If I had a dollar for every time that I heard a pilot on a “superior” type sneer at his colleagues operating smaller, older and thus “lesser” equipment I’d have retired 20 years earlier. The worst part is that this mindset is self perpetuating. The way the award is structured also encourages this mindset.
We are our own worst enemy.