So why not cite the author?
I have no idea which book that stuff came from. What I have is photocopies of several of the chapters from that book. None of the pages shows the name of the book.
The section I was quoting from has a title page which says "Chapter 14 - Dollars and Sense of Airlines".
Could you confirm that the passage is from 'Flightpaths', a book by Geoffrey Thomas and Christine Forbes Smith? It appears to be.
You say "appears to be". Can you please be definite about this as I have found this material to be extremely interesting and informative and would like to purchase a copy of this book. Hopefully there is a more recent edition!
You have quoted figures there about COSTS; most of which are fixed and have nothing to do with what a pilot gets PAID.
Capt Kremin,
I am puzzled at why you say "have nothing to do with what a pilot gets paid". The principal figure I was working from was the "staff" component of the total costs for the 2002/03. That figure was 3 billion AUD and represented 28% of all costs to Qantas for that year.
That figure is, in effect, the sum total of all money (including super) paid to all employees for that year so I would have thought that that figure had EVERYTHING to do with what the staff got paid.
I bring this up as an admission that when I'm puzzled, it usually means that I've misunderstood something.
So it is very easy to work out what the cost per passenger is on a London return ticket for the entire crew.
Yes, and that is true for the crew that share the aeroplane with those passengers. But, the passengers, through their tickets, are paying the salaries for ALL Qantas pilots - not just the crew flying them at the time.
As a long time PPRUNE reader I have learned to be wary of these "calculations" that pilots do between themselves whilst sitting in the cruise whiling the hours away. Apart from assuming 100% load factors, these calculations never seem to look at the full picture.
For the philosophical "proof" of my assertion above - that passenger tickets pay for ALL pilots, not just those on the same plane - consider this:
If Qantas were to plan to do only ONE flight for the 2011/12 year, they would need to build into the ticket price enough dollars to cover the salaries for all the pilots for the whole year.
If the A380 return trip to London was that only flight then the tickets would cost almost one million dollars each (based on the 02/03 figures).
So, what I am saying is that this "$40 saving" is misleading in the extreme. It does not indicate what you think it does.
To make that calculation much more meaningful, however, please do it again, but this time with ALL the Qantas pilots working for FREE for the WHOLE YEAR. That result will be far more enlightening.
Which brings me to my next point:
there was a forum on Qrewroom dedicated to how much pilots cost the company per hour
Why do these pilots insist on working things out on a "per hour" basis? The pilots are not paid on a per hour basis. Please work everything out on an annual basis. Only then would it be possible to do meaningful calculations and comparisons.