Patrick Smith, author of Ask the Pilot, has an interesting piece on the changes in regional airline pilot pay. In case you weren’t aware, regional air pilots used to be paid peanuts — Smith notes that his first piloting job for a regional paid $14K in 1990 (which, adjusted for inflation, is $31K in 2022 dollars). That’s not a lot, considering that those pilots had to pay for all their training, including expensive simulator training. Their jobs were also stressful, as shown in the investigation of the 2009 Colgan Air crash near Buffalo. Pilots tolerated regional jobs as long as they could have a reasonable chance of moving up to a major carrier.
Since regional carriers now fly about half of the routes in the US, the “up and out” strategy wasn’t working for many pilots, so the pipeline of trained pilots dried up:
[…] Having been in this business for over thirty years, I can hardly believe I’m typing these words, but a first-year pilot at a regional carrier can now look forward to a a six figure income. Or close to it. I can’t overstate how staggering this is. That’s ten times what I made in 1990. Above and beyond the monetary improvements, several regionals have also put together “flow-through” agreements, whereby regional pilots are guaranteed a future slot at a major.
The pilots’ union, the Airline Pilots Association, seem to have been unable or unwilling to stage job actions that would bring pressure on the regional carriers earlier. I’m sure that’s more easily said than done. Still, for whatever reason, I’m glad that my family and other relatives, who by necessity fly regional carriers out of their smaller cities, will be taking planes piloted by fairly compensated pilots.
Baud
The problem is that pilots just don’t want to work anymore.
Searcher
I’m assuming the breaking of the Air Traffic Controller’s union was especially well-remembered by pilots.
Ken
@Baud: Also those damnéd government regulations that bar them from working an 80-hour week.
Kristine
I’m glad to learn this. I live near major airports, so I don’t need to fly regionals often if at all. But it’s a highly skilled, demanding job and people should be compensated, dammit.
Walker
One of the things the pilot shortage has caused is that many high-time flight instructors are going into the airline industry. So ironically, we do not have the instructors right now to train more pilots to solve the pilot shortage.
My wife just finished her Certified Flight Instructor certificate last week. She had to go Alaska to get her checkride because it is essentially impossible to get anything in the lower 48 right now.
WereBear
The pathological underpinnings of today’s MBA infest everything.
Splitting Image
Well, well. It looks like the magic of the free market doing its work.
For once.
Amir Khalid
I remember when Patrick Smith was writing Ask The Pilot as a weekly (I think) column for Salon. Always an informative and entertaining read for those interested in a commercial pilot’s work and life, general aviation geekery, and Chik-Fil-A sandwiches.
Dorothy A. Winsor
As someone who used to live where I had to fly regional airlines, this is a little scary.
artem1s
Time to break up the monopolies that mean every flight has to go thru a couple of choke point airports to get anywhere. Municipal airports all over the country are struggling because a merge or bankruptcy meant losing a hub. And the air traffic controllers continue to struggle with overload. It’s a waste of fuel and time. I hope this helps the regional airports and airlines grow and survive but I really want to see Delta and American broken up too.
jonas
I regularly fly out of a smaller regional airport on those small commuter jets and I always felt bad for those pilots and flight crews knowing that they were basically working for little more than minimum wage even though it requires so much training and stamina. Glad to hear things are getting better.
DCrefugee
The reason ALPA and the Allied Pilots Association, which represents American Airlines pilots, were “unable or unwilling” to go to bat for pilots at regional carriers is really rather simple: The more-senior pilots they represent didn’t want the competition. A shortage of pilots serves their needs.
That said, and although I am aged out of such a career, I hold an ATP/MEL and wouldn’t think of going to work for an airline.
catclub
There is that, but my take is, having dealt a little with pilots, is that they truly love to fly and would do about anything to get in more flight time. This makes hard bargaining difficult. And the evidence is they have been taking shitty, low paying regional jobs for years.
Put it this way: How many fewer minor league baseball players would you have if you lowered their already pitiful salaries? My guess is no fewer. They really want to play.
RepubAnon
I’m glad the regional airline pilots are being paid what they’re worth. A YouTube channel I watch, Mentour Pilot, had some interesting analyses of incidents and accidents on commercial airlines. Very informative.
(https://www.youtube.com/c/MentourPilotaviation/videos)
Steve in the ATL
@artem1s: why do you hate the ATL?
Baud
@Steve in the ATL: Both the Falcons and the Braves blew leads yesterday.
Starfish
I know several pilots (because I live near a Frontier airlines hub), and one was living with his father with his wife and children as he was trying to rise up through the system. Once he got a job with a major airline, his family had to move to a different part of the country to be closer to the hub that he works out of now. Mind you, piloting also takes a stay at home parent if you have any kids because your hours will be erratic if you are in one of the lower positions. You might not be given regular shifts. You might make up the hours by taking shifts for other people.
Some of the more senior pilots have consistent shifts. Some of them chose to take whatever the pay the airline gave them during COVID and just let the younger guys with the younger families take the actual shifts, so they could make more money.
Doug R
I told my wife about this story and she remembers talking to a pilot back in the day when I was working as a driver for Purolator (Teamster). Apparently he was making LESS than me.
Roger Moore
It’s amazing how often complaints about lack of workers are solved by better pay and working conditions.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
On the other hand, enough minor league players signed union cards that organized baseball caved and decided to recognize their union without a protracted fight, so apparently minor league players have seen the value of unions no matter how much they want to play.
The Moar You Know
Both my father and father in law are retired pilots from US Air (now American).
I have a LOT to say about the entire industry and how pilots are treated (the first year has traditionally been unpaid, which is ludicrous) but I want to clear this up right now as it ruined my FIL’s life and would have ruined my dad’s as well except that he diversified his retirement:
ALPA has been a bought and paid for stooge of airline management/ownership for many, many decades now. They no more represent their dues-paying employees than the ownership of McDonald’s represents theirs. They’ve been sued often enough for fucking over their membership, but somehow money is found to fight those suits in court until all the plaintiffs are dead. Corrupt does not even begin to cover it.
I am as pro-union as it is possible to be (and amazingly enough, so still is my father) but every member of ALPA’s management should be in jail.
ETA: lotta ill-informed comments on this thread already, as I should have expected.
narya
@WereBear: If I had gotten a job as a professor, that was my second book. (Seriously; I still have a half-assed outline in my head.)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Baud: DeSantis showing the way in Florida. People won’t work that crappy job, well he will send the National Guard in to make the sure the remaining staff works that much harder!
Starfish
@The Moar You Know: You bring up a lot of interesting points here.
Historically, there have been numerous corrupt unions. When the leadership of a union is broken, do you create a new one? Is there a way to come back from it?
Central Planning
I was chatting with a couple next to me at the Cabo Wabo bar in Vegas back in June. The guy was a pilot for one of the major carriers and was about to quit and take a higher paying job with another carrier. Seemed relatively young too, like mid-30s. I think he came out of the military. Anyway, the new pay was something like 33% more than he was making. Good for him!
The Moar You Know
@Starfish: I don’t know. I have no idea how you fix this.
What happened to my father was that the union and airline didn’t want to pay the pension of the 150+ most senior pilots, so they simply stole the principal, split it between them, and took those guys and put them on the PBGC. Clean and neat heist. The union management who participated in this then promptly retired. There is a court case. Nobody expects anything.
Geminid
Mr. Smith began flying as a commercial pilot in 1990. I attribute his low pay back then to the deregulation of the transport industry begun in the Carter administration. This started a race to the bottom in wages that accelerated under Reagan.
All transportation industries were affected. My late friend Chris, a topnotch furniture mover, was making a good living in the middle 1970s, and that was not easy for a Black man in Virginia. He struggled to raise a family from the Reagan years on. Chris was a loyal Democrat, but he always held a grudge against Jimmy Carter.
Another Scott
I knew an AF guy a few years ago who was part of the group that flies AF2 (VP, SoS, etc.). He flew all over the place at a moment’s notice. I asked him if he was planning on going commercial when he retired. He was emphatic that there was no way would do that. He was tired of being away from his family, the long hours, etc., and knew it would be even worse in the commercial world.
I imagine that he’s not alone, and that “cheap” pathway for airlines to get experienced commercial pilots is very different from the way it was in the, say, 1960s.
The MBAs and MotUs really have broken a lot of what made working in a profession enjoyable.
Cheers,
Scott.
evap
I have a good friend who recently retired from flying for FedEx. He started out flying for a regional airline in the northeast back in the early 1980’s and it was a pretty crap job. The pay was lousy and the crew had to do things like clean the airplane after trips. After a few years he was able to get the job with FedEx and he was pretty happy with his career.
Ruckus
@WereBear:
“The pathological underpinnings of today’s MBA infest everything.”
That bears repeating a few times because it’s the basis of a lot of problems in the US. Not everything in the world is about money, unless of course you involve MBAs. (It was explained to me a long time ago that MBA stands for must be asshole – now I know that can not be 100% true, but the exceptions sure seem to be far fewer than the total and normal statistics would indicate)
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Strange isn’t it that more people don’t understand the value of eating regularly?
The Moar You Know
@Geminid: Dereguation broke the airlines and most of the other transport industries, and here’s the amazing thing, at least to me: EVERYONE KNEW IT WOULD. Ownership, management, employees, politicians, voters. Every person involved knew it would absolutely ruin all the transport industries and beggar the workers. And Carter did it anyway.
Hell of a human being, pretty shit president.
randy khan
@Amir Khalid:
He was there around the same general time frame as Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald has become a lot more famous, but Smith’s work has much higher social value.
I enjoyed the extent of his geekery, including talking about the liveries of various airlines and which ones were best. (Not to mention his view that the A380 was ugly, which I think is entirely correct.)
Jager
@artem1s:
I was on American a few weeks ago. The crew was based in LA. The senior flight attendant said AA doesn’t originate any International flights from LA. Almost everything originates in Dallas. Usually, senior crew members get the first shot at good international trips, but the SoCal-based senior crews don’t get any.
randy khan
I think the story here is pretty much the same as a lot of other low-wage professions. Prior to COVID, the regional pilots did not have much leverage, because supply of pilots exceeded demand, but since senior pilots retired without being replaced during COVID, things have changed.
But what they were being paid was criminal.
Nelle
@Walker: my husband just got his certification for instrument flight instructor two weeks ago.
Matt McIrvin
@randy khan: The A380 is an awfully nice plane to fly in, but in hindsight, it was already obsolete when it came into service.
Walker
@Nelle: Double I is much easier to get right now. The restrictions for that checkride are significantly less onerous. There are many people that can give a Double I checkride that cannot give a CFI checkride. CFI checkrides need to be booked many, many months in advance right now.
p.a.
Isn’t it about 20 mins into the first “Introduction to Macroeconomics” lecture that the concept “the Free Market is only legitimate when it benefits capital” is introduced?
Chief Oshkosh
@The Moar You Know: Not sure that everyone knew this at the time. Also, an argument can be made that deregulation resulted in more competition, the creation of more airlines, and a lot more affordable flights. Where it failed was was in the complete lack of industry regulation that Reagan and Bush I (and Clinton) encouraged, and this was not unique to the airline industry.
Overall, though, I think that the outcome of deregulation and the later near-complete degradation of any meaningful industry regulation is a great lesson in what Smith actually wrote about in his Wealth of Nations. That is, markets must be regulated. The so-called free marketeers, conservatives, and right-wingers never acknowledge what Smith was really all about.
Maybe they don’t have the ability to read a book all the way through?
Barry
Where is the article?
i can’f find it.
Thank you!
Geminid
@The Moar You Know: Jimmy Carter was an engineer and that was a weakness for him as a politician. The economists told him deregulation would bring efficiency and he bought that.
Had Carter won a second term his policies might have slowed the race to the bottom for labor that Reagan accelerated. Instead the efficiencies that Carter’s deregulation brought were credited to Reagan, and the hollowing out of the middle class that accompanied them was barely noticed by elites.
The Moar You Know
@Chief Oshkosh: I dunno. It’s pretty hard to miss. He says it all the time. In the first forty pages, for certain. After reading it, I kept thinking “well, conservatives must just be counting on the fact that nobody reads economics books for fun, because this book is pretty fucking explicit about how regulation is not optional”.
JaneE
@Searcher: That, and the common assumption that all pilots make big bucks because some pilots do plus the fact that a strike creates major headaches for the general public, both flyers and anyone in the vicinity of an airport that is big enough to get traffic backed up or overflow the parking lot from delays.
I remember an air traffic controllers slowdown in ’68. All they did was space the traffic per regulation, instead of letting everyone in and out ASAP. When you are circling over NYC at 30K for over an hour and the pilot comes on to let you know that if you don’t get clearance in 30 minutes they will need to divert to Boston because of fuel (after a special stop to pick up extra fuel before crossing the Atlantic) the needs of the individuals staging the work stoppage don’t really matter any more.
I suspect the Pilot’s association knew they would get little support from the general public, even though their pilot’s compensation was pitiful.
Matt McIrvin
@The Moar You Know:
WHAT
The Moar You Know
@Matt McIrvin: um, yeah. My dad’s first year was unpaid. So was my father in law’s. My dad had been a medevac and resupply captain in Vietnam, my FIL had been a F-4 driver and is kinda famous for a MiG incident (don’t want to give too much more info about that) and was one of the founders of the Top Gun school. They weren’t rookies by any stretch of the imagination.
Both did not get paid for their first year of flying commercial. That was normal for the industry. I read stories in the early 2000s about rookie pilots being on food stamps.
randy khan
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve flown in an A380 once – Business Class from Narita to LAX on Singapore, which I’d never flown before. It was, ah, quite nice – much nicer than I’m used to, but the plane looked like something Donald Trump would draw from the outside.