Race to the bottom
 

Toxic Management is an international aviation disease....

CNBC Travel

A toxic culture and ‘race to the bottom’: Pilots open up on why air travel is in chaos

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/29/air-...ne-errors.html

Seabreeze

To be fair it is not an international ‘aviation’ disease but a disease of modern corporate culture. Allowing upper management to enrich themselves off short term cost cutting KPI’s drives the behaviour that consigns all workers to ever worsening conditions.

Aviation is finished as a lucrative career in Oz. Only for the diehards and passionate lovers of it now.Those who have just started in airlines will have a good job don’t get me wrong, but will not enjoy the [relative] pay that those enjoyed in the past. Pay as we knew it is finished, there’ll be no more $400,000 plus a year for Airline Captains after new future agreements are negotiated. Before people come in and dispute my figures I’ve got mates in Qf who earn $440,000 on the 330 and over $500,000 if they’re in training [including super and allowances]. We’ve already seen 747 + 380 conditions eroded on the 787 and 350 awards. Those currently on the 380 and 330 and 787 at Qf are on the last of the best we’re ever going to see. We’re watching Network, Cobham, Jetconnect, Alliance etc, walk in and fly for half of what the Qf 737 crews get paid. Good luck to them, it’s a job offer and I’d take it too.

Yes it’s definitely a race to the bottom as airline executives pit work groups against one another to hire the cheapest labour they can. Things cannot get better they will only get worse. For those that might say a pilot shortage will change things; there are always stacks of pilots flying around the world willing to come home and fly for less. Rip aviation in Oz and great pay. Airline management has successfully seen to that.

Curiously, why does the Qantas 330 trainer earning 500k or SO earning 200k get quoted as including overtime, super, allowances etc etc.

Do people not bank super before seeing it, spend allowances on dinner and drinks, or refuse overtime? Or is it just a way to peacock?

Its always a mate or someone thats knows someone with a mate doing the quoting too, never the mate themselves.

It was asked on another thread and now I can't not notice it anymore.

Personally I don't consider myself to have any real control over what sort of overtime, bonus, allowances etc I get thoughout a given year so I dont get too fixated on it.

I only look at my take home pay after all deduction/car payments etc so really never compare to anybody really

If you lament the erosion of salaries to $500k I think you need a reality check.

why? What are you worth?

Absolutely - why do we undervalue what we do in comparison to other professions to our own detriment? We are our own worst enemies when we argue for things to go backwards.

That's because it's the top right hand figure on our payslips and includes everything. It's the easiest thing to quote.

I'm lamenting the erosion of salaries from $500,000 because we'll never see them again, despite inflation running away at 6% at the moment.

Pilots used to be compared to the pay scale of judges, now we're a shadow of that. Pilots used to have pays of many multiples of the average weekly earnings, now the multiples are shadows of that. When I say pilots I mean Captains in Qantas which used to be the only international airline in Australia, and I'm talking 60's through to the 90's. since then the contract has been downgraded and continues to be. I stand by my points in my initial post. Pilots at the top end of the industry in Australia are on the last of the good pay, it's a race to the bottom, and as others have said above why are we going backwards versus other professions, and why do we continue to accept it. Have some value about yourself man!!!!!!! We're in a highly skilled professional job with massive responsibility. Why talk yourself down, airline exec's with MBA's and straight out of Uni love hearing us devalue our profession. Divide and conquer in a race to the bottom, I'm glad I'm not starting off in the industry.

QF’s last 3 negotiated EBAs will see A350 and 787 skippers and A321 skippers (albeit at max hours) making $400k or close to it, so your “future” will have to be aircraft arriving here post 2040.

Really only for S/Os. Plenty of very good feedback from 787 CAs and FOs, no one in those positions stating their conditions have been “eroded”.

That’s definitely true.

And watching them as they walk out the door almost as fast.

Maybe that's the outlook management count on.

Funnily enough, I can’t find PJRUNe to verify that….

Debating pay is pointless, it’s market economics. The simple fact is that becoming a Judge is far harder than becoming a Qantas Captain (and please don’t quote time to command, thats a BS seniority issue). Lawyers take a pay CUT from being a QC or SC to be a judge.

Good on QF Captains for getting $500k, Pilots across the world should make the most of the current shortage, and lock it in.

There is however a certain irony to your lament given the constant whinging from QF Pilots about their executive pay levels… perhaps a cultural issue?

Some true some not.
Those four companies have base rates for captains of between $170-$195k. Is that HALF of a 737 captains salary? $340-$390k?
All four are certainly learning the folly now of not being an "employer of choice".

Only Network 320 and Jetconnect can be compared like for like to a QF 737 pilot.

A 717 and E-Jet/F100 are around 25-30% smaller so you’d need to account for the size difference when comparing pay.

You also have to remember the market is totally different to when those gold plated salaries were the norm. Many less people used to fly and when they did they paid a premium for it. Regulation ensured National Airlines had a monopoly on the gold palted money making routes and the number of pilots employed on the massive salaries were far fewer. Meeting an Airline Captain was rare. Now days the market has changed, passengers are plentiful but only because the low cost model has changes the game, margins are tight and the sale of onboard items like muffins make up viable cash flows for the airline. Salaries are lower but there are many more jobs for pilots. I went overseas in the 90’s as at that stage Air NZ had over 3000 CV’s on file with appropriately qualified pilots and were recruiting 20 ish per year. The fact is many did go overseas leading to a massive cohort who did enjoy good money making conditions and can afford to come back and work for less further dampening the ‘shortage’ that may or may not exist. Gold plated contracts are gone and only a massive shift in the travel habits of people will bring them back. The likes of Jetstar, Virgin, Jetconnect etc will NEVER pay those numbers.

Times have changed, pilots are not regarded as highly as they once were and in part it's true that the skills required to be a good pilot are no longer that higher standard. Just about anyone can be trained as a pilot now with reasonable judgement and hand eye coordination, and almost any working age group as well. So in broad terms the job is no longer the highly skilled occupation it was where you needed to be good on the stick and rudder or navigation skills and now is more of a technician working a piece of computerised machinery via a checklist and SOPs. You see the dumbing down every day where approaches are being dropped, radio calls seem to be talking to idiots (being told to hold short of runways you should know you have to), pilots refusing to do visual circuits or the SHEED arrival at Melbourne because its all too complicated, basic visual approaches and dealing with traffic and other airplanes seems all too hard.

So you then have to justify why you get paid this level of income to sit and watch a computer fly from A to B (public perception not mine). The whole glorified bus driver quip from a certain time stuck with the job unfortunately, so yes big paydays will never come back until there is a real sustained lack of pilots, but will that drive up pay? probably not, companies will just pack up, reduce schedules or just shut down to meet supply rather pay more. If GA is proof to the puzzle than companies rather go broke than pay more and look for ways to improve conditions, after all that would take effort.

So now you are all “Children of the magenta line” and you still want the same money as those who flew before its existence? Bean counters want a return on all that expensive new automation hardware and software.



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I think using the “children of the magenta line” as an excuse for cheaper wages is a bit rich. Sure there is the reduced requirement for actual “flying” and that is something I definitely miss, but there are other aspects that we never really had to deal with when flying the classic noise makers.
Crew these days have a lot less operational support than we used to, every aspect of your flying is under scrutiny through a myriad of flight data reporting, the amount of traffic at airports has increased massively, ground staff etc are inexperienced, little support for management… the list goes on.
it’s a good argument to have over a few beers, but in the end crews today should have the opportunity to be remunerated to a comparable amount that crews have in the past, it’s just the complexities of the job that has changed, not the responsibilities.

Automation has far less risks, the historical data proves it. There are different risks, but airliners are far safer now than say in the 1970s, when there was a lot of handling accidents on large jets. Part of the reduced handling mishaps are due to better SOPs, but a lot is due to modernisation of approaches, aircraft equipment and ATS coverage. Planes tell you when they get too low, come too close to other planes and getting off course by more than a mile means serious pilot input error to the FMS, rather than just some slight miss tracking or DR between ranged NDBs. You also now have RADAR/ADSB watching you over most areas with alarms built into the system if you stray from plan/clearance. Major airports have sensors to tell ATC when you cross a hold line, etc etc... Then there's just general reliability of the machines and maintenance practices that means major failures are few and far between. Most air returns and shut downs are due to indication errors rather than actual component failures. And when you have a failure its now really not a struggle between man and machine to remain airborne, where early aircraft didn't have the design features or thrust in some cases to deal with problems with many more cases of overloading occurring.

Its very easy to see types that are not as 'foolproof' and have nasty traits, like the ATR, which has an abnormally high accident rate for that type of aircraft. Or some Russian or Chinese types that regularly appear in footage with some catastrophic failure, or fire.

Pre 1980s a Captain was paid to not only fly and command the aircraft but bare a lot of responsibilities on layovers such as making decisions given no or difficult communication with the company. Now you can call company from just about anywhere, and more modern stuff will communicate aircraft issues inflight before the crew know it, with engineering able to send crew alerts and so on.

On the Met side, pilots have ridiculous amounts of information at hand, from close to real time radar coverage of huge areas to satellite pictures, hundreds of automated weather stations, weather cams. If you seriously think that today is anywhere near as bad or worse than years ago you simply are not using the system.

With regard to pay, none of that matters, you get paid what the company offers and what you accept. Now if the accident rate started to go up, you would see some companies lift pay and conditions to attract better pilots as a result, as with recruitment standards and minimums going up. Thing is, the accident rate is very low and really non existent in most notable Airlines, so they see no need to have Chuck Yeager in the left seat anymore. We havn't even got to desperate airlines yet either, where they actually pay for mass cadet courses, then you know the pilot shortage is real.