...Lady Gaga plays a mean piano....
Posted on 10/15/2009 11:25:48 PM PDT by ozguy
Michael Moore's pointing out something no one in the media seems to want to discuss: How little money the people who are flying commercial planes are getting paid. As he says, these are not the people you want working a second job:
We're on the descent from 20,000 feet in the air when the flight attendant leans over the elderly woman next to me and taps me on the shoulder.
"I'm listening to Lady Gaga," I say as I remove just one of the ear buds. I know not this Lady Gaga, but her performance last week on SNL was fascinating.
"The pilots would like to see you in the cockpit when we land," she says with a southern drawl.
"Did I do something wrong?"
"No. They have something to show you." (The last time an employee of an airline wanted to show me something it was her written reprimand for eating an in-flight meal without paying for it. "Yes," she said, "we have to pay for our own meals on board now.")
The plane landed and I stepped into the cockpit. "Read this," the first officer said. He handed me a letter from the airline to him. It was headlined "LETTER OF CONCERN." It seems this poor fellow had taken three sick days in the past year. The letter was a warning not to take another one -- or else.
"Great," I said. "Just what I want -- you coming to work sick, flying me up in the air and asking to borrow the barf bag from my seatback pocket."
He then showed me his pay stub. He took home $405 this week. My life was completely and totally in his hands for the past hour and he's paid less than the kid who delivers my pizza.
(Excerpt) Read more at crooksandliars.com ...
I want you to quit ordering so many french fries. I am sick of waiting in line.
These new jets have auto pilot, can’t they help serve drinks?
...Lady Gaga plays a mean piano....
Moore doesn't like paying, yet the pilots should be paid more money.
Such an idiot.
I call total BS. Moore is a master of misleading propaganda.
Check out Airline Pilot Central. It has pay scales of Capts and FO for the different airlines.
Hey Michael, quit taking up two seats.
Isn’t it against the law for airlines to advertise their safety record? What if it weren’t? What if you could pay twice as much to fly on a ten times as safe airline?
Can I take El Al everywhere?
Sorry...but this pos pegs out the BS Meter.
Not buyin’ or believing any of it.
Here ya go...
Delta attendants don’t. (not while they are working)
I thought the same thing... This is too good to be true for Moore who will no doubt spin this into more money, that evil capitalist..
Or else what?
If this letter does in fact exist he or his union has grounds for a lawsuit. Or even more intimidating to the company, an FAA judgment.
The FAA would love to hear about it, since that kind of pilot-pushing is blatantly illegal.
Havent looked at that site, but the pay scales vary a great deal, depending on what type of airline the pilot flies for. The “bigs” like United, etc. pay fairly well, but the regionals like United Express, Delta Connection, Horizon, and so forth, pay darn little. New pilots get on with the regionals and build time toward moving up to the “bigs”.
I still would doubt anything Moore says, though, just on principle. I’d be very surprised if that swine even flies commercial at all. He seems like the Gulfstream Liberal type to me.
Check out Airline Pilot Central. It has pay scales of Capts and FO for the different airlines.
I did.
As much as I hate to agree with this big fat jerk, it's true that beginning pilots make slave wages.
You get what you pay for. Just don't fly with a regional airline that pays those kind of wages, especially if the weather is bad.
Oh wait, good luck with that. The code-sharing agreements nowadays almost always have the low-time pilot 'commuter airlines' feeding passengers to the bigger hubs, so it's not so easy to avoid flying on them.
I am going to hate myself for saying this, but Moore is correct on this one. I have almost 30 years in the industry. Now I am going to take a shower and wash my mouth out with soap.
Well, if scum like Moore force government run health care down our throats, doctors may have to work two jobs also.
You are entirely correct. Here in Sweden the average salary of a GP is about 65k a year. Are you going to go through all that schooling and take on all that liability for 65k a year?
Here's another kicker. My kid's go to an private international school. The only people who send their kids there are the diplomats and corporate types who can afford it. There is another, less prestigious, less nice school (english speaking, as is the international school) that is state funded. That is where all the doctors and research specialists have to send their kids. They can't afford the private school. But, the diplomats sure can.
On the Democrat's world, they want to make sure the corporate kids can't go there either. Just the elites from the government. IMO, THEY should be the ones sending their kids to the substandard 'free' school.
You are right. All government employees should have to live with what they force onto us. Government run health care, substandard schools, illegal immigrant crime...
A good number of pilots have a business on the side. A back up in case of health problems. Insurance. you never know.
If that new bill goes through, requiring the ATP for first officers, the regionals will have to raise salaries; I would think....
Some of it happened at Colgan Air, and the FAA is plenty interested now, only because the public is interested.
WASHINGTON — The co-pilot of the commuter plane that crashed last February near Buffalo said shortly before takeoff that she felt so ill that she would have called in sick had she not just flown across country to report to work, according to data released Monday by investigators.
Co-pilot, Rebecca Shaw, 24, could be heard sniffling and sneezing during the two hours before the Feb. 12 crash that killed all 49 people aboard the flight and one person on the ground, said an expanded National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) transcript of the cockpit recording.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-07-27-buffalo-plane-crash_N.htm
A FO doesn’t need an ATP ticket??? WTF!
Thank you for being honest, and even when you dislike the source, having the courage to look at the evidence.
parsy, who wishes there was more of this
As much as I hate the government making laws that screw with the free market, the public will get more experienced pilots as a result of this one, should it go through.
Apparently you care enough to post a comment:
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If he was on a 19 seater or possibly a regional jet $16k-$20k would not be unusual for a pilots salary ...
Don’t feel bad; that Sully who landed the plane in the Hudson River complained about the same thing (months before Moore). Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I got my ASEL in the 80’s. At the time, I toyed with the idea of working my way up and turning it into a career. Doing a little research, I found out that green FO’s at the time were making under 20k / yr.
A 60% pay cut for a 20k investment in training didn’t make sense - and wouldn’t have made my new wife too happy.
Lady GaGA is a tranny
My wife just bought me Sully’s book for my B-day. At the back is the transcript of the mishap, denoting all conversations and audible cockpit warnings. The very last recorded entry, after the plane has come to a stop in the water, is a computer-generated warning that says “retard”. Who the computer is referring to, I do not know.
OK, I get the idea that a regional airline will have newer pilots, which theoretically could be more dangerous (although it could be safer because they just finished training, and they will be working hard to prove themselves).
But what difference does it make how much they are paid? You think they would be better pilots if you just paid them twice as much?
I guess nobody should go to the hospital, because we’ve all seen that interns get paid almsot nothing and are worked for dozens of hours on end.
I have some friends who are pilots. Flying doesn’t seem to be like brain surgery.
I’d almost be more afraid if my bus driver had a second job. He’s much more likely to get me killed or injured, because his job is a lot more dangerous than an airline pilot.
But it doesn’t say that she was forced to work sick. It says that she used bad judgment because she had already flown across the country. My guess is the flight was going to get her back toward home.
How do the pilots get experience if they have to have experience before they can fly anybody?
Does Michael want our doctors and nurses working two jobs?
I know people who pay thousands of dollars a year for the privilege of being able to fly.
SO my guess is it wouldn’t be hard to get some really good pilots to fly a local airline for $25,000 a year. Especially if they had a business on the side that runs itself, it would be a great way to get to fly around without having to spend your own money.
Every single person I know who decided they wanted to fly a plane, and who had enough money to do so, ended up being able to get a pilot license.
On the other hand, I would imagine that would NOT be the case for brain surgery.
I have no doubt that, with 3 months of training, I could fly a plane. It just isn’t all that hard. I’m sorry if this offends you for me to say this, and you of course will probably dismiss this anyway, but my guess is that the job I do requires more specialized skill than flying an airplane.
On the other hand, I get into this same argument whenever I point out to teachers that, while I respect them for their work with kids, that they could easily be replaced, because almost anybody can get a teaching degree. Teaching is a field people from MY field go into if they get tired of working so hard. And I’ve yet to see a retired teacher, or a pilot, show up to take a job in my field.
Not that my field is so special, there are hundreds of thousands of people who can, and do, do what I do.
It’s not that hard to learn to take off and land in the local bounce pattern. I’ve always said I could teach a monkey to do that.
It’s not even that hard to take off on a CAVU day and follow the highway to the next airfield and land there.
But, there’s a big difference between local field ops with no one in your aircraft but you and a passenger filled aircraft in bad weather with not everything going according to plan. It is that hard and not every private pilot has the specialized skill (or stones) required to do the job day in and day out.
The local commuter guys don’t get paid enough in my professional opinion.
I still don’t see how paying them more would mean they were more experienced.
And I didn’t mean to suggest that experience wasn’t important. But the only way to get experience is to actually fly, and the only way for most people to get enough hours flying to gain experience is to get paid to do so, and paying lower wages while people get the experience is a common thing in many industries.
The reason pilots get paid so little is that a LOT of people are qualified to be pilots, and a lot of people would LOVE to be pilots, so there is a lot of supply of willing workers, compared to the demand for pilots.
The rules requiring experience for the major hauls lowers the supply of workers, thus driving up the cost of those workers, so they get paid more money.
So I guess rather than arguing over this, I should have asked the question, is there any evidence that paying regional pilots more money would have prevented any regional airline accidents?
Are there more-experienced pilots out there who simply won’t work the regionals because the pay is too low, and therefore we are stuck with less-capable pilots? (well, the answer to that is probably yes). But the real question is, are those less-capable pilots creating more danger than is justified by the savings people get flying?
Remember, driving is more dangerous than flying. So if we drive up the cost of flying, we will make more people drive, and therefore kill more people. So even if cheap pilots means an airplane crashes once in a while, killing everybody, it could be better than raising ticket prices and getting that many people or more killed on the highways.
The local commuter guys don’t get paid enough in my professional opinion.
Or at least buy them a drink in the airport bar while you’re both waiting for the flight departure time.
But what difference does it make how much they are paid? You think they would be better pilots if you just paid them twice as much?
Absolutely, the lack of training and experience makes all the difference. Some of these commuters hire pilots with only 250 hours of TOTAL time. Those people that died in the Colgan Air crash would be alive today if it weren't for the lack of experience AND training by the two pilots (the Captain was the older of the two pilots but didn't start his career in flying until he was in his 30's).
The last six air disasters involving passengers were commuter airlines -- the kind we all fly on thanks to code-sharing.
Anyway the rules are about to change -- all airline pilots will require an ATP, which is the most rigorous rating, and requires 1500 hours total time.
So I guess rather than arguing over this, I should have asked the question, is there any evidence that paying regional pilots more money would have prevented any regional airline accidents?
Are there more-experienced pilots out there who simply won’t work the regionals because the pay is too low, and therefore we are stuck with less-capable pilots? (well, the answer to that is probably yes). But the real question is, are those less-capable pilots creating more danger than is justified by the savings people get flying?
Remember, driving is more dangerous than flying. So if we drive up the cost of flying, we will make more people drive, and therefore kill more people. So even if cheap pilots means an airplane crashes once in a while, killing everybody, it could be better than raising ticket prices and getting that many people or more killed on the highways.
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