"Healthy wage" I agree with, "frankly ridiculous" and "money for old rope" I do not.
"With NS captains taking home well over £150k incl benefits, and co-p on about £80k, for working 200 days a year" - inaccurate and misrepresentative.
I don't feel there is an analogy with EMS or police. It is very difficult to try and compare pay for flying jobs based on one metric - "trickiness"? Responsibility (number of souls)? Number of hours flown? Reason/value in financial terms of the flight? Resources the operator has available? I could go on. What about the Police Officer who is having to deal with the armed suspect the helicopter has pinpointed on his now extended 4th 12 hour shift for £21k? Or the paramedic, should they be paid less than the pilot?
Automation changes our role from more hands on to managing the systems, but in many situations managing the systems is more challenging than flying it yourself, unfortunately not always allowed due to regulator, client or operator rules. This is reinforced in our regular CRM training with recent and pertinent examples.
Challenging - over water (can't just land in a field), arriving and departing to undersized decks at the limit of the aircraft performance with no option of landing short or long, accepting exposure with an engine failure on departure from rigs, manually flown night deck approaches to undersized decks with no horizon and poor visibility, multiple changes to loads and destinations before and during flights requiring accurate recalculations and commercially sensitive decisions shall I go on? I'm not a captain but I would imagine doing all of that whilst also mentoring a copilot with around 300 hours TT and 50 hours NS could be quite challenging.
Fatiguing - all of the above plus 4 earlies in a row, regularly hitting hour limits, the looming threat of redundancies, never ending new EASA directives, less comfortable and more fatiguing clothing and safety equipment, disgruntled and sometimes jumpy passengers also worried about their jobs and also well aware that the 2 guys or girls up front are feeling the same and over analyzing your every control input.
As you have intimated it comes down to supply and demand in the eyes of many, but that ignores experience, forward planning, and I know it's old fashioned now but loyalty. There are plenty of people qualified to fly EMS who would do the job for less, so are they overpaid?
Last edited by tipsock; 21st Apr 2016 at 09:28.