Demise of the Airline Pilot
2) While ditching was the safest and easiest thing to do with the surest outcome, the event was replayed by airlines and manufacturers in simulators and all test pilots were able to return to LaGuardia for a safe landing.
3) Checklist procedures (though poorly designed) were not properly completed and the pressurization outflow valves remained open thus bringing water into the fuselage.
4) It was absurdly suggested that the crew committed one of the most common violations of federal air regulations: They broke sterile cockpit, the rule that proscribes having conversations not pertinent to the safe operation of an aircraft below ten thousand feet. This rule would be cited a month later when the transcript of Colgan flight 3407 showed the crew was talking about fatigue, low pay and long commutes to work without adequate rest before that plane crashed.
5) Even advocates for the manufacturer tried to diminish the accomplishment by pointing out how an Airbus, designed with a European socialist mentality takes the pilot out of the equation, not only prevents a “dumb pilot” from stalling or over-speeding an aircraft but, in this situation, ensured that they had hydraulic power and instrumentation despite the loss of engine driven pumps and generators.
So why is Sullenberger, who never put himself on a pedestal higher than others, a hero to so many airline pilots? Simply put, it’s because he has used his fame to draw attention to the plight of his profession. When the Republican airline pilot appeared before Congress he said: “Flying has been my lifelong passion, but while I love my profession, I do not like what has happened to it. My decision to remain in the profession I love has come at tremendous cost to me and my family. My pay was cut by 40 percent and my contractual entitlement to a retirement pension was stripped away ... Airline pilots do not live in a vacuum, and we understand fully and are sympathetic to the fact that many Americans have recently experienced economic difficulties. But, airline employees have been hit by an economic tsunami ... I attempt to speak accurately and plainly, so please do not think I exaggerate when I say that I do not know a single professional airline pilot who wants his or her children to follow in their footsteps.”
As someone with aviation pursuits outside of his career, it’s a fair guess that he is a member of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, an organization whose relationship to pilots is analogous with the one between the NRA and gun owners. Perhaps, he read the June 2006 AOPA Pilot article “The Glory Days Are Over” written with great anguish by Capt. Barry Schiff. The 73-year-old Schiff spent three decades at TWA flying everything in their fleet; and has managed to get checked out in over 300 different aircraft types for recreation. He described his post-World-War-II career as one characterized by rising pay and improved working conditions with each contract renewal, but in retrospect.
That era came to an end in 1978 when President Jimmy Carter’s deregulated of the airline industry. When Schiff’s son Brian was hired as a pilot in 1989, the future looked bleak because, as a result of deregulation and all the changes which followed, he would surely work harder and for less pay than his dad. Things went from bad to worse for this young 727 captain when TWA merged with American Airlines. In two years he went from the left seat to the right seat to the street. He now flies a regional jet for the American subsidiary American Eagle. Schiff’s other son Paul bounced around at regional airlines for over six years but never made as much as $30,000 a year, and the little that he did earn was quickly eaten up in the expenses associated with working 21 days a month away from home. Paul Schiff had no social life and no hope of settling down because, even if he had the time to meet someone, he couldn’t afford to date with an empty wallet. After much agonizing, he left the profession and opened up a pet supply company.
While Schiff Senior concludes that he cannot recommend the pilot profession any longer, he conceded that “Coping with the challenges of weather, communing with nature in a way only pilots can appreciate, and manoeuvring a sophisticated aircraft from one place on Earth to another remains a stimulating and gratifying endeavour. It is the price one must pay to get there that is so discouraging.”
This love of flying is what makes this career unique, and it is this love which makes flying part of their identity as pilots. Most can look back to their youth and recall always looking up at planes that flew overhead and drawing doodles of aircraft in class when they should have been paying attention to the teacher. Can an attorney say that he dreamt of trying cases when he was in grammar school? This infatuation explains the pilot’s willingness to work in horrid conditions but it also explains the sacrifices of time and money which people are willing to incur to become an airline pilot; it also explains how the airlines can use this infatuation to drive down wages. Only within a minority of pilots trained at the expense of the military can there be found individuals for whom flying is just a job; second to being an officer. Many aircraft manufacturers wrongly assumed after WWII that the returning pilots would want to own their own light aircraft. Acting on this erroneous assumption, the aircraft builders produced such a glut of personal planes, which went unsold, that most went out of business. After a while, planes like Buckley’s Ercoupe could be purchased by college students. The fact that both president Bushes and John McCain never touched the controls of an aircraft again after leaving the military isn’t any more exceptional today than it was then.
Unlike other first world countries, the U.S. has usually been able to rely on a pipeline of pilots from the military, particularly when airline opportunities were too few for one to justify the training investment themselves. Recognizing that military flying entails its own set of skills, a set of skills not completely congruent with the skills needed to fly commercial planes, legacy carriers such as All Nippon Airlines, Japan Air, Lufthansa, AlItalia and many others eschewed pilots trained in the military and preferred to rely on ab-initio programs to train their pilots themselves. This usually means that the theoretical training is accomplished in the home country and practical training is done in the U.S.A. where the cost of flying is less than prohibitive due in part to an abundance of low paid American flight instructors trying to build flight time in the hopes of breaking into airline flying themselves. Closely monitored along the way, these pilots have been safely placed in the cockpits of jetliners with less experience than most pilots hired stateside through affirmative action quotas.
The ‘60s saw the only true pilot shortage in the United States. It was short lived, but it forced airlines to train their own pilots. From this group emerged men like future MEC chairmen Rick Dubinsky and Roger Hall two of the fiercest champions of unionized pilots ever seen on the property of United Airlines.
U.S. commercial aviation’s love affair with the military is, however, about more than just avoiding the costs of training pilots. While it’s true that one can hardly distinguish the background of a pilot after a few years with an airline, as new hires, military pilots are often the least militant of labor groups. Until the end of the first contract negotiation they experience, their peers will often view them as Kool-Aide drinkers easily swayed by managerial agitprop.
The year 1919 saw the first attempts to unionize Air Mail pilots. When the Post Office forced its pilots to fly in the weather element they feared the most, namely, fog, the pilots went on strike, and military pilots, who were more compliant than their union-affiliated colleagues, were brought in to break the strike. The results, for those unfamiliar with instrument flying, were disastrous. The loss of personnel and aircraft that came about as a result of the government’s attempt to use docile military pilots to break the first strike resulted in a recognition of the authority of a pilot to determine when to fly and when not to and the equipping of the early mail planes with primitive weather instruments.
When the pilots of Century Airlines struck in 1932, Army and Navy pilots were released from active duty to take their places, and the Department of Commerce sent a special team to certify the new hires. Attempts by the nascent Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) to make their case to the new hires along with job promises for the strikebreakers fell on deaf ears and were further thwarted by the airline, which forced the new hires to live in a guarded dormitory, take their meals together, and ride to and from the airfield on a guarded bus.
In 1946, TWA was struck, and this time the pilots were threatened with replacement by an organization called the Military Pilots Association (MPA), a group of pilots flush with recent four engine experience and boasting 13,000 members, who had allegedly flown in the Air Transport Command. So brazen was this group that they took to calling pilots exempted from military duty because they were involved in essential service “draft dodgers” and they insisted upon receiving seniority rights over those already on the property if called upon to break the strike.
And this brings us to Ronald Reagan and the PATCO strike of 1981. According to Alan Greenspan, “Perhaps the most important, and then highly controversial, domestic initiative was the firing of the air traffic controllers in August 1981. The President invoked the law that striking government employees forfeit their jobs, an action that unsettled those who cynically believed no President would ever uphold that law. President Reagan prevailed, as you know, but far more importantly his action gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and discharge workers.”
It seems the distinction between public employees and private employees makes it illegal for the former to strike but Greenspan thinks the termination emboldened private employers to respond similarly. In the years following Reagan’s successful attempt to break the strike, we were forced to endure an inadequate ATC system reminiscent of the third world, and it was the military that provided the replacements, even if in time the replacements would form NATCA and start to resemble the group they replaced.