Everyone budgets to live within their means (or should).
A pilot may have budgetted on 100k a year so for him to suddenly find himself earning 90k, despite the latter still being an enormous figure, would be a real blow to the system - perhaps as big a blow as me finding my 30k a year drop by the same percentage of earnings to 27k.
It's impossible to judge who will be hit hardest by any pay cut. Impossible.
Sure - it could be argued that for a pilot to spend c. £6k a month would take a lot of effort, that's not to say some of them aren't doing just that.
What Mr. Walsh earns doesn't bother me. Nor does what Mr. Bunker earns (but he has told me before, pre-marriage, and I will be expecting him to buy the beers when we next fly).
I only care about what I earn. I only spend what I have available to spend and I only look out for protecting my own terms, conditions and earnings.
But I can recognise that protecting these things doesn't have to be as straightforward as towing the Bassa line. Sometimes you have to look at things closely yourself and determine whether, believe it or not, the company isn't actually out to screw the pooch.
The pilots should keep their noses out of what cabin crew earn (just as cabin crew should keep out of what the pilots get in their bank every month) but, unfortunately, Bassa has made this all very public by calling for unjustified, unwinnable strikes to take place which are creating a VERY REAL threat to the future stability of the very company responsible for paying every single one of us. That's why the pilots are so keenly involved in this whole situation - and I really can't blame them this time.