An interesting and thought provoking article from the New York Times.
By BOB BUCK
IT'S that time again — time for airlines to make pilot pay the burning issue in labor negotiations. At Delta Air Lines, pilot salaries are in arbitration; at Northwest Airlines, pilots are close to striking.
Why is pilot pay always such a source of contention? Perhaps because it seems so high. After all, a pilot can make as much as $220,000 a year for working only 85 hours a month.
But this is only part of the story. True, a handful of senior pilots make $220,000 a year, but 85 hours is only half true because pilots spend as much time planning flights, looking at weather, studying, training and sitting around airports waiting for delayed flights, as they do flying. The 85 hours is counted only from the time the airplane leaves the terminal until it arrives at its destination. What's more, this is the very top salary; a captain for a regional airline, for example, makes around $60,000 a year.
And it's not as if pilots haven't already taken a hit. The Delta pilots agreed to an annual pay cut of $1 billion, or 32.5 percent, in late 2004. (Now Delta is asking for an additional $305 million.) Their Northwest counterparts agreed to $265 million of cuts in 2004 and $215 million in temporary cuts last year. Now the company wants to cut $145 million more. Pilot pensions are in a similar state of disarray.
This is not to say that pilot pay isn't high relative to other lines of work. The high pay dates back to just after World War I, when airmail service, which was managed by the Post Office, was established. And to my mind, the pay was wholly justified.
Back then, flying was dangerous; no radio guidance, no instruments for bad weather, no de-icing equipment or radar to reveal thunderstorms. Flying was all contact, meaning that you stayed in visual contact with the ground. Trying to see ahead when fog or low clouds forced the pilot lower and lower, with no visibility; pilots lost their lives running into hillsides or unseen obstructions.
In exchange for risking life and limb, pilots were well paid. In 1924, the top salary was $8,000 a year, or close to $1 million in today's dollars. In 1938, when I started flying DC-3's for Transcontinental and Western Air (later Trans World Airlines), we still were paid more for flying at night and over mountains.
As flying became safer, pay was reduced but still remained high. How? The pilots formed a union, the Air Line Pilots Association, in 1931. The key man was David L. Behncke, a retired United Airlines pilot, who fought the airlines' attempt to have one industry-wide contract for pilots. By seeing to it that pilots had individual contracts with each airline, Behncke ensured that each negotiation could build on the one that came before it.
He also helped to keep salaries high by emphasizing productivity as well as safety. Behncke argued that a pilot hauling 400 passengers should make more than one transporting, say, 70 passengers. This was a winning tactic, though I was never certain that it was entirely accurate. Smaller planes are not necessarily any easier to fly. A 747 pilot, for example, takes off from New York and lands in Paris: one flight. A regional jet pilot, by comparison, can wind up making five stops during one day, or night — or making all his flights in the same lousy weather system.
People think that computers have made flying easier — you just turn on the autopilot and relax. Not so. Computers do many things, but they don't know what to do when a line of severe thunderstorms blocks the flight path, nor do they worry about marginal weather at destinations and what to do about reserve fuel and a host of possible situations that can be resolved only through human intelligence informed by experience.
There are simply too many situations that demand a professional in the cockpit. I've flown for a long time, and I can't begin to count the number of times I've heard a colleague say (or felt myself), "I earned my year's pay on that flight."
Here's just one story. In June of 1970, I was piloting a TWA 747 from Paris to New York. Forty minutes into the flight, TWA's Paris dispatch office called to tell me I had a bomb on board. According to the warning call they had received, the bomb was due to go off in 45 minutes.
We turned around and dived toward Paris. We started dumping fuel to get our weight down, but we didn't have time to reduce the weight to the legal landing limit.
Decision time: land and risk going off the end of the runway, or circle around dumping fuel before the bomb goes off? Landing a plane that's overweight takes up runway space. I visualized what was off the runway's end: farmland. I concluded that it was probably worth the risk, even though we'd knock out lights at the end of the runway as we slammed through.
Thankfully, we landed safely. The passengers were evacuated down the slides while still far from the terminal. (Officials didn't want us nearby in case we blew up.) The only injury was a fracture in a flight attendant's ankle. They never found a bomb.
Airline pilots go through stuff like this all the time. This is why they deserve to be paid decently (if not extravagantly). It's for this reason that I hope the union will remain strong as it works with Delta and Northwest (and whoever's next) on problems of pay, retirement and safety. As they talk, pilots, I know, will do their job of getting airplanes from departure to destination safely. After all, the pilot is on board, too — a fact that should be respected, but not taken for granted.
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