I do not think, that there is much point in the US getting open skies and I do not think it will benefit the employees or american airlines.
I believe, there are a lot more passengers in the US, so obviously EU carriers would love unrestricted access, but what would the advantage be for the US?
For obvious reasons, I, as a US airline employee, is against it. It will further deterioate the employment landscape here, just compare VA pay to say DAL. Secondly, I am concerned that it will not stop there, but that cabotage, as in what has happened with freight carriers in ANC, will happen on the pax side on a much larger scale. Next ting we know, we will have mainland Chinese airlines flying around with $1000 a month Captains. Then we will see some serious degrading of US payscales. Now you may ask, how does EU-US open skies lead to this, simple, once you open the floodgates, it will happen really quickly.
From the supplied data, we see that on average, the US pilot pay is about 15 percent higher than the EU average. Compounding that disparity is the pay of accession countries such as the Czechs who pay a whopping 1/9 of SAS. Now, they do go on to say, that in the NEAR term, accession countries will not be able to supply many pilots. One must put extreme emphasis on Near Term, because long term they may be able to and then EU pilots as well, will see extreme downward wage pressure. We all know, the beancounters would love it and the pax, well at long as they get low fares, they really could not care.
BA serves IIRC about 12 or more destinations in the US, where as US carriers serves perhaps a dozen in the UK. Of course, US carriers will not gain acces to LHR on a larger scale.
So, I may be off the mark, but tell me again why I should support this?
Last edited by Diesel8; 13th Feb 2004 at 10:28.