The reason I am surprised by it is that: If someone is able to spend all that amount of free time just to get to/from work - then the financial reward must be huge. That fact then tells them their salary is very good.
You are mixing financial reward with lifestyle choices.
Long distance commuting is almost always about family, and secondly lifestyle. Finance is at the bottom. For these people if you halved the salary, they would still do the commute.
Google,
crash pads for flight attendants You will begin to get the size and extent of the "problem."
To quote another source, in the USA this time where it is a far greater problem.
Pilots for regionals frequently commute across the U.S. for flights because they can’t afford to live near the airports where they’re based, Darby says.
Before operating a plane, they often sleep in crew lounges or at so-called crash pads, temporary apartments where as many as six pilots share a bedroom. Former Colgan pilot Preusser lived full time in a crash pad in Albany, New York, in 2007.
He says he slept on an air mattress and shared a room with three or four people. One pilot slept in a walk-in closet, he says. Many regional pilots can’t afford meals and keep track of which hotels offer free continental breakfasts, Preusser says.
Preusser says he remembers falling asleep in the cockpit while piloting a 50-seat Embraer RJ145. He had been on standby and was assigned at the last minute to fly a 7 p.m. flight from Dallas to Cincinnati.
‘It’s Very Scary’
The next day, he started at 5 a.m. and flew three more flights. On the final trip that day, he dozed off for a few seconds.
“That adds up to: Let’s just play Russian roulette with air traffic safety,” Preusser says. “In the pilot world, being aware of your environment and what the airplane is doing is absolutely requisite. You’re not fully conscious or even conscious at all and then you snap to, and it’s very scary.”
John Nance, a retired Air Force pilot who also flew for Alaska Airlines and has about 40 years of flying experience, says airlines are closing their eyes to issues of training, pay and living conditions among regional pilots.
“This business of see no evil, hear no evil doesn’t cut it,” says Nance, who’s testified for both plaintiffs and defendants in civil cases as an expert on air safety. “It is totally unacceptable legally, morally, ethically for any airline leadership to pretend they don’t know what they know.”
A link to
The original article.
These people commute because they are so
poorly paid, not because they are so
well paid.
Low cost sometimes does mean low standards.