Demise of the Airline Pilot
operation. Sometimes this comes from operating newer more efficient aircraft, but in the end it usually comes about through cutting the costs of salaries, training and maintenance. There is intense competition between regional airlines for these contracts, and their options are that limited.
Major airlines have now shifted so much of their flying over to regional partners that we are now in a situation where regionals make up the backbone of the domestic route structure. The pilots of major airlines were only been able to slow this process through what are known in the industry as “Scope agreements.” Pilot contracts attempted to limit the flying performed by regional partners by restricting the capacity and range of regional aircraft. The efforts to stop the chipping away of these constraints have been in vain. In 1997, the pilots of American Airlines struck to prevent American Eagle from acquiring regional jets, but then-President Bill Clinton ordered them back to work after 30 minutes. When they engaged in a sick out in 1999 over the farming out of flights to Reno Air, the union representing the American pilots was nearly fined out of existence. After calling them cry babies and comparing the pilots to the Mafia, Judge Joe Kendall declared: "If the activity and consequent damages continue, when all the dust clears, all the assets of the union, including their strike war chest, will be capable of being safely stored in the overhead bin of a Piper Cub." Kendall was even bold enough to trot out the old canard that because pilots are limited to 100 hours of flying per month, they were part-time employees, when their actual duty times frequently doubles this figure and includes time they are not compensated for.
Federal law may require the name of the regional airline operating your flight to be listed on the ticket and somewhere along the outside of the plane, but as far as airline executives are concerned, they’d prefer you to assume you were flying on the mainline carrier, unless there’s is a crash, at which point the liability assumed by the contracting regional kicks in. Unfortunately, it has taken the deadly crashes of some regional aircraft to highlight the abysmal working conditions at regional airlines.
Low pay, long hours, debt, and despair typify the life of a regional airline pilot today. Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story probably introduced many people to this fact. He interviewed pilots who collected food stamps and were reprimanded for getting sick. He asked how a pilot who makes less than $20,000 per year can expect to pay off $100,000 in loans taken out to qualify for the job. For safety’s sake, the FAA limits the amount of hours a pilot can fly and be on duty, but it doesn’t prevent a pilot from holding a second job and showing up to work tired. Moore revealed that pilots waited tables, walked dogs and donated blood on their days “off.” It was refreshing to see that someone was bold enough to divulge this dirty secret on the silver screen.
Perhaps he didn’t want to push the bounds of credulity, but Moore missed entirely the other half of the story, which is that some of these pilots are in essence paying to ride up front. Given that regional pilots (flying planes that are starting to even look like what the majors are flying) are able to transition seamlessly to the mainlines, management at the regionals has devised training contracts and pay for training programs to curb attrition rates. Paying a living wage would defeat the purpose of regionals. By far the most egregious offender in this area is Gulfstream International which has expanded the idea to create another revenue stream.
During the Eastern Airlines strike of the late ‘80, Capt. Thomas L. Cooper, a strike breaker who proudly had “#1 Scab” emblazoned on his flight bag, founded a small on-demand air taxi which flew to Haiti and the Bahamas from South Florida. The company initially operated eight passenger piston powered Cessna 402s. Through a third party company named Avtar International, they did their pilot recruiting at job fairs and with ads placed in Flying magazine and glossy career oriented publications like Career Pilot and Piloting Careers. As the old ads in Flying show, for $8,900, a pilot could get 150 hours of real world multi engine experience as a first officer in an airline environment, all legally loggable toward the ATP. A military pilot or a flight instructor with the requisite 1,500 hours of total time for the Airline Transport rating (ATP) could attend a weekend course at ATP, Inc., where the test prep would put the SAT courses to shame. Through feedback, they had managed to whittle the test down to 200 potential questions, and the applicant would spend a few hours looking at answers on one of their proprietary PCs and then when he was confident enough, move to another computer and take the actual test. A test that would normally take hours could now be aced without reading the questions or pulling out the pilot’s slide rule or maps. The practical test in the airplane was similarly slipshod. Yet, after completing this program, such a pilot, provided he had an additional $15,000, could be a captain at Gulfstream International, though it’s doubtful with such limited experience himself whether he could provide any useful mentorship to his first officers.
Ideally, the first officer would complete his time and then be replaced by someone else with “a check book and a dream.” Not being in the military environment or in a European style ab-initio program, low time civilian pilots are faced with the old conundrum: how do you get a job without experience; how do you get experience without a job? At a stage in their career where flight time is more valuable to them than fair wages, paying less than it would cost them to rent the plane is an attractive proposition.
The program came with good news and bad news, neither of which was advertised. Because the program relied heavily on foreign nationals who could secure low interest educational loans but had difficulty obtaining the appropriate visas, U.S. pilots often had the chance to fly more hours than they purchased because this source of pilots was unreliable when the immigration laws were sporadically enforced with some vigor resulting in the deportation of pilots.
The bad news was, that these first officers, technically, weren’t required crew members and if passengers loads or other weight limitations dictated, they could be bumped from the flight. Hopefully, this would only happen stateside when it was easier to hitch a ride home.
Such conditioning quickly transformed the interning pilot into a groveling sycophant willing to sell out his peers and curry favor with management and the captains with whom he shared a room on layovers for the chance to work more without pay and ultimately log enough time to qualify to buy a paid position in the left seat.
As the airline grew, it transitioned to an all-turbine fleet which required two pilots, but it retained the pay-to-fly programs even when the airline evolved into a true regional replete with code sharing agreements and new paint schemes modeled after the airlines it served. Program costs increased with the size of the planes flown, for time spent in larger planes is worth more on one’s resume and topped out at $39,000 for 500 hours in the heaviest turbo-props. At one time, even Red Chinese were sponsored to fly there by their home country.
In 1995, in response to derision from the pilot community and the need for at least a core of co-pilots who were dependable, U.S. citizens were remunerated at a rate of $8 per “segment hour” or less then $10,000 a year. It was a reluctant move by management but was easily offset by increasing the cost of tuition. Nothing changed for the foreigners except that now their badges were stamped in red “Jumpseat Not Authorized.” The last thing the company wanted was someone riding in the cockpit of a major airline (particularly one they were code-sharing with) describing the program in broken English, because by now they were being compared to prostitutes.
It’s baffling to non pilots why a professional would submit himself to indentured servitude but such a path was, if all went well, the fastest route to the flight deck of a major airline short of a sex change, and the Gulfstream Training Academy literature has the data to support this claim.
Major airline pilots who were eager to have their kids follow them into the cockpit would solicit these pilots for information on the program’s ability to fast track one’s career and were undeterred by the fact that they were sending their sons to work for a bottom feeder that should’ve changed its call sign from “Gulf-flight” to “Catfish” a long time ago.
Next to Michael Moore’s movie, the second best description of life as a regional airline pilot can be seen in the PBS Frontline documentary “Flying Cheap”.
The program did a fair job of depicting the long hours and low pay endured by those who fly passengers who are convinced they are flying on the planes of a different company. The underground market of crash pads where 10 pilots share an apartment intended for 2 people was fairly depicted. No consideration was given to the increasing complexity of aircraft being flown at the regional level, but the major shortcoming of the program was the inchoate manner in which it elucidated the relationship between mainline pilots and regional pilots. It correctly explained that there was no mentoring or even any actual contact between the two when they are performing their jobs. While it correctly stated that regional airline pilots were able to upgrade to captain much more quickly than major airline pilots, the attractiveness of this is not the higher pay but the fact that it enables such a pilot to log valuable pilot in command (PIC) time making him more attractive to the recruiters at major airlines although probably not the major airline he’s currently serving as a regional pilot