Hey 411a
During the last contract at AA (in 96-97) during negotiations, the APA offered the Southwest pilot's contract word for word. (including the self funded retirement, stock options health insurance, productivity etc)
CrAAndal rejected it and said that there was no wAAy that they could afford to pAAy that. Because of the inefficiencies of AA schduling practices and the penalties to Southwest should they be similarly inefficient in the scheduling of the pilots, AA determined that the southwest pilot's contract was way more than they could afford to pay.
The problem is not pilot salaries, the problem is inefficencies in scheduling by the airlines (both of the aircraft and the pilots).
But you keep hammering on the pilots. They could fly the aircraft for free and it wouldn't matter. All a pilot wants to do when he goes to work is fly the damn jet! The only way the pilot can get the airline to do that is with a complicated contract including rig, duty time and TAFB provisions.
There really is no excuse for the amount of overnighting and whatnot that goes on around the system, Transatlantic/Pacific excluded. For example, flying in the caribbean out of NY its 3.5 down and 3.5 back for most flights. There is no excuse to do anything other than turns. Then the airline doesn't pay for hotel rooms, rig time, etc.
A pilot should never report for work and fly significantly less than 8 hours in a day. But if I fly New york to Sanjuan, lay over and fly back the next day for 7.5 hours of flying total, the airline deserves to get burned. (Yes Aircraft overnight terminators/originators in Sanjuan are different, I am talking about in the middle of the day when we have 6 or more flights in either direction.)
IF an airline actually scheduled their flight crews efficiently, they would do much better. (productive crews are happy crews, crews sitting in the hub taking a 4 hour 59 minute productivity break because 5 hours would get em a hotel room, are trouble/expenses waiting to happen!)
The problem is not pilot salaries, the problem is poor managment.
The British have a great expressions for airline managment (Southwest excluded, and JETBlue is waay to new/small to count yet) They couldnt organize a pissup in a brewery... I used to say that USair couldn't make money if they were hauling cocaine...
Cheers
Wino