Originally Posted by
cactusbusdrvr
I have never understood the weak dick mentality of pilot unions in Europe. Lord knows, every other workforce is ready to burn the place down (cough, cough, France).
You want to know why pilot salaries are high in the US? Pilot unions and seniority lists. Every airline has both. Being locked into a list means you will do what it takes to improve your wage and benefits. And since we are now 40 years into the post deregulation environment there are many opportunities for pilots to choose a job so that forces carriers to offer attractive packages to entice new hires. Los Estados Unitas is a big country with crappy public funded transport, particularly inter city. So aviation is a staple. Passengers, cargo, everyone wants to be there or get their package deliveries right now. So aviation flourishes.
Another thing to consider is that aviation terms and conditions are only now starting to recover to the pre 9/11 terms. Airline management took advantage of the terror attacks on 9/11 to destroy pilot contracts. They were able to do this until the basic economic principle of supply and demand caught up with the lack of pilot starts driven by those ridiculous starting salaries for regional pilots. Now they are playing catch up. And they are paying to play. FUPM.
The reality is that the passenger has been taking advantage of low fares that can easily absorb an elasticity in price. $99 fares across the country are not good for anyone except the great unwashed who are **** to have as passengers anyway. Post Covid flying a bunch of domestic flights I had more unruly passengers requiring police meeting the flight than in my previous 38 years of airline flying. Thankfully international opened back up and the issues were left to the guys flying domestic. Business travelers will pay the fares, and it’s just a small part of the operating cost of a flight even if both cockpit crew are making $555/hr. I pissed that much away if I held 10 minutes going into LHR.
Lack of scumbags willing to work for peanuts (Europe is plenty of them )- at the time the salaries were low lot of american pilots flew to Asia- .