You could double pilots' salaries, and in the big picture of airline operating costs, it is still minimal.
The fact that the salary has appeared to be high has always rankled with certain managerial misfits, who have found their way into positions of executive power.
Those individuals have been rewarded with packages for trimming airline costs, which seems paradoxical, seeing they were paid to manage in the first place.
It is a pity that pilots are such a fragmented bunch, industrially speaking, imagining that they can do very well on their own. The fact is, that if they were united in the broader sense, they would do very much better.