Demise of the Airline Pilot
because airlines prefer to raid a competitor’s cheap labor supply rather than their own. Logging valuable flight time quickly is why pilots often seek out employment at the least reputable airlines. Recall that Gulfstream even hired pilots straight into the captain’s seat.
Although “Flying Cheap” seemed more like a serious documentary than Moore’s box office flick, it did stoop to histrionics in the production department. Most glaring was the way in which they inserted audio of piston engines over the turbine whine of the Bombardier Dash 8. Such melodrama plays to the ignorance of people who don’t understand that short range, low altitude aircraft are more efficient with external propellers even if they don’t really sound like DC-3s.
Nevertheless, they could’ve used this track to dub over the expert testimony of the former DOT Inspector General Mary Schiavo. You can always count on “Scary Mary” to show up whenever an airliner crashes, but her presence seems to prove that industry and government will tolerate criticism as long as it’s easily refuted and the source has been discredited. Her best seller Flying Blind, Flying Safe contained so many factual errors, such as a completely erroneous description of how pressurization works, that the real experts were distracted by offering corrections to these errors and away from fixing what’s truly wrong with the industry. In 1999, she correctly surmised that airport security was weak and tried to make her case by checking a fake bomb (a bag with shoes and telephone cables) onto an airliner in Ohio and then deliberately not boarding the plane. The scheme blew up in her face when “the bomb” was immediately detected and resulted in the shutting down of the airport until she came forward and confessed to cameras while trying to invoke journalistic immunity. This woman has blown nearly every opportunity that crashes offer to reform the industry.
Nevertheless, if you go to the PBS website, the text of the entire interview can been seen. The fact that it was axed from the final cut that aired on TV is proof of the saying that even a blind sow can find a truffle.
FRONTLINE: So why doesn't free enterprise, the capitalist system, work in this industry?
Schiavo: Because safety is like a rubber band. It doesn't work because you can stretch it. Planes -- a lot of them are just great. They're overbuilt. The big, old, tough Boeings were forgiving. You can stretch safety, and sometimes you don't get caught. Why? Because you can skate on by.
And bad operators can skate. Good operators often aren't rewarded for their good efforts on safety. And even when something does go wrong, they're not held accountable because the insurers step in. They take care of the issue. The bad actors are free to go forward and fly again. If you wanted any evidence of that, it's the secretary of transportation standing on the Everglades, on the backs of the downed ValuJet plane.
And there really is no accountability that you expect from a true free-enterprise system, and that is that the bad are allowed to fail. That's part and parcel of the free-enterprise system. But in aviation, the bad don't fail. The bad go to bankruptcy court, come out washed. Every seven years, it's like a pilgrimage. They go through the bankruptcy court. The bankruptcy trustee wipes out the debt, often wipes out what's owed to hardworking pilots and flight attendants and everybody else.
And this is an industry that simply does not work. It does not operate in the free-enterprise system. So why do we pretend that it does? It doesn't. It operates in this gray area. It's partially regulated. The government pays for a huge hunk of it. The government now pays for security. The Aviation Trust Fund pays for air traffic control, and the runways and the airports -- you can't even get an airport anymore without -- I mean, we get a new airport in this country, what, every decade or so? And then you have to float the bonds, and it's run by a regional airport authority. That's not free enterprise!
So there's really nothing in this system that is free enterprise -- except the red ink.
Then just when it sounds as if she’s on to something, Schiavo up and calls a state of the art aircraft a “puddle jumper.”
Unlike basketball where free agency enables players to move freely among teams seeking the best deals, the pilot profession severely penalizes lateral movement.
The seniority system gets blamed for protecting bad pilots, but it also takes away bargaining leverage even during times of shortage because it requires that they start over at the bottom even if it is at a better airline. They are married to the company and dependent upon its success for their careers more than any other employees.
An airline pilot’s bad decisions can’t be saved by a parachute, neither nylon nor golden but CEOs manage to play musical chair amongst themselves.
It is for this reason that ALPA can take credit for many of the advances in safety such as improvements in navigation, equipment that helps avoid midair collisions and Controlled Flight into Terrain (CFIT) and work rules that take into account things like the body’s circadian rhythms and thus prevent schedulers from treating pilots like cogs in a machine. They have even instituted immunity guaranteeing self-disclosure programs that help to prevent accidents by providing researchers with data they would likely never see because so many slip-ups are never caught by the regulators. As the ones who typically arrive at the scene of an accident before anyone else, pilots had a vested interest in using their clout to force these improvements into law long before CEOs, lawyers, passengers, law makers and bean counters ever recognized the benefit. Through the years, ALPA’s motto has been: Schedule with Safety.
The crashes of regional airliners have thus far been unable to bring about any significant improvement. The recent crash of Colgan 3407 is prompting legislators to require regional airline pilots to have 1,500 of flight time before flying for an airline, but no consideration is given to the quality of the experience. Such a rule might harm schemes like the one at Gulfstream International, which has had no fatal accidents, but it would not have affected the Colgan 3407 flight, where the crew exceeded those qualifications. Training also escapes scrutiny, and no one is asking why the crew responded to a stall resulting from a decay in airspeed on approach and performed a recovery technique suited to a tail-plane stall resulting from ice around the very time operators, with FAA approval, were starting to introduce this seldom met phenomenon into their training curricula.
Following some prominent regional crashes in the mid-‘90s, Congress passed the infamous Pilot Record Improvement Act of 1996. Rather than look at training or working conditions, airlines were going to be made safer by tracking bad pilots and screening them out. Improvements wouldn’t be made to training, only the keeping and sharing of records. Under the law, before a pilot can be employed by another carrier, his current and previous employers must release all training and disciplinary records. The pilot is supposed to be offered the opportunity to dispute anything negative but releases his company from liability for any inaccuracies transmitted through paperwork reflecting judgements made through very subjective criteria. Not only does such a policy prevent a pilot from quietly seeking employment elsewhere, but it hampers whistle blowing and has been documented as a pilot retention technique at regionals like Trans States, where failure rates were up to 80 percent are used to show the FAA they had really high standards. Even more absurd, the law doesn’t require the airline doing the hiring to even consider what’s in the information packet when it arrives, and applicants from the military are exempt.
Regional airline industry growth came about as a result of circumventing expensive labor contracts at the mainlines, but now they are exerting a downward pressure there to the point where Sullenberger’s retirement depends upon re-telling his story for an income. Is it practical for every pilot to ditch a jet at the end of his career in lieu of a pension? This story will get old really fast.
Flying on Regional Airlines is inescapable domestically unless passengers restrict themselves to Southwest Airlines. With Sullenberger and Schiff advising against becoming pilots for even major airlines, how do the regionals expect to fill their cockpits now that the carrot of eventual employment with a major airline is less attractive and more elusive with airlines shifting more of their flying over to regionals?
After decades of telling pilots that the next hiring boom is around the corner and subscribing them to glossy career magazines with interview prep questions, statistics to compare themselves to, resume writing services, featured airline of the month articles, etc, the premier counseling service AIR, Inc. closed its doors on 2/13/2009 with the words: “It has been an honor and a privilege to serve you during the past 20 years. However, the current status of the airline industry and the economy has made our business unsustainable, and we are closing.” Prospective pilots just aren’t going to get this kind of pep talk from their guidance counselors.
The prospect of a job with a major airline has motivated many regional pilots to keep their records clean by flying safely, but now as despair sets in we’re seeing the effects of low wages.
Flying has been described as hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror and that is why complacency is the biggest killer.
When Comair flight 191 lined up with the wrong runway at 7am in Lexington, Kentucky the crew made a fatal error that costs the lives of all but the first officer by over running a runway that was too short to their plane to become airborne. Their complacency was fed according to the NTSB by:
a failure to use available cues and aids to identify the airplane's location on the airport surface during taxi and their failure to cross-check and verify that the airplane was on the correct runway before takeoff. Contributing to the accident were the flight crew's nonpertinent conversations during taxi, which resulted in a loss of positional awareness and the Federal Aviation Administration's failure to require that all runway crossings be authorized only by specific air traffic control clearances.
The first officer apparently grew impatient waiting for a major airliner to recruit him and took this job after working at Gulfstream International.
Pinnacle Flight 3701 was a repositioning ferry flight with no passengers that turned into a deadly joy ride to exploit the capabilities of an empty regional jet. On the way up to the CRJ-200’s maximum altitude, the crew ignored several warnings and induced a flameout of both engines. From 41,000 feet their time in the glide seems like an eternity next to Sullenberger’s but fear of reprisal kept them from declaring an emergency. A prompt declaration would have given them preferential handling by ATC and several viable options. Instead, as their boredom turned to terror, and they tried cover up their recklessness with more deviations from standard operating procedures. In the end, they overflew four diversionary airports and crashed and burned two miles short of the fifth behind a row of houses in the dark. Both pilots had worked for Gulfstream International and had presumably given up hope of working for a major airline.
Prior to the crash of the aforementioned Colgan 3407, the crew had been chattering about their appalling working conditions. The captain was a demoralized former pilot at Gulfstream International.
After the decline of the entire profession which resulted from the shift to regional airlines, we now find ourselves in a mess with no way out. The bottom has yet to be reached.
Last year, Gulfstream International was fined $1.3 million for falsifying crew member flight times. The very airline that has employee spaying to work for them can’t seem to exploit then enough, and now has pilots flying beyond FAA limits. That fine, added to one incurred for the ignominious distinction of being caught using car parts on their planes, has forced the company into bankruptcy, and yet they continue to fly.
Jobs at the majors are too few and increasingly too unattractive to entice pilots to work for food stamp wages at the regionals which now make up the backbone of the domestic airline system. Nobody but a fool would invest the time and money necessary to become an airline pilot with these limited prospects. Some will continue to fly and slowly pay down debt or because, while Burger King may pay better, leaving aviation even temporarily could make all their efforts for naught. Along with flight time, employers want to see currency and recency of experience. They want to hire pilots who are working as pilots and pilots not flying find it difficult and expensive to get themselves re-qualified.
It’s doubtful that the airlines will be able to fall back on the supply of social engineered military pilots soon to arrive with new tolerances. Last year, the Air Force trained more pilots to fly UAVs than fixed wing aircraft. Until the fantasy of unmanned airliners comes to fruition, these pilots are best advised to stay in the service because for now only the electronics department of Best Buy or the local hobby shop will appreciate their skills with radio controlled aircraft. The stagnation and low pay at the majors offer little enticement for entering civilian aviation and the demands of regional aviation with its compressed training schedules can be a rude awakening. When the parent company of American Airlines and American Eagle (AMR) got the Eagle pilots to sign an 18 year contract it did so not by offering better working conditions at Eagle but rather offering the carrot of a potential “flow through” of its senior pilots to American. The unanticipated events of 9/11 brought, instead, a “flow back” of junior American Airlines pilots, like Brian Schiff, to American Eagle.