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 ...
There’s a difference between the single engine clear weather licenses most anybody can get if they’re just willing to spend the money and the time and the multi-engine instrumented rated license, that’s hard to get because those tasks are hard to do, and that’s what the passenger plane pilots have to be.
Additionally, presumably these pilots would have to get 10,000 hours in the same types of light aircraft as they got the rest of their hours -- at some point there is a point of diminishing returns, the "knee of the curve", which would be far fewer than 10,000 hours, but certainly more than 250 hours.
Also, while the study SAID 10,000 hours, if you look at the actual data, there was a drop-off in deaths in the 5000-9999 hour window.
However, above 9999 hours, the death rate increased precipitously, and never returned to the 5000-9999 level.
So it might be that we would be safest if airline pilots flew only cargo until they got to 5000 hours, and were only allowed to fly 5000 hours of commercial, and then they had to go back to cargo.
Of course, that’s putting a lot of faith into a simple study of whether older pilots are riskier or not.
I have no doubt that the pilots in the Colgan crash needed better training, but I do doubt that increasing the minimum hours will correct the problem of lack of qualified training.
Colgan air operated out of Manassas for years, and had a good record. My state senator founded the airline, and they just sold it in the past couple of years.
But there is still the underlying question. If you paid the pilots more, would those people be alive?
And if you raised the price of every commuter flight to pay the pilots more, and 10% of the people stopped flying commuter and instead drove, would MORE or FEWER people be dead today?
I’m sure with sufficiently high-priced tickets, I could ensure that every one of my commuter plane trips was made on a super-safe jet flown by the most experienced pilot in the world.
But I would never want to pay that much to fly, and am willing to even risk DEATH in order to save money on my airline flight. Because the relative risk isn’t as important to me as the absolute risk, and the absolute risk of airlplane flight, EVEN taking into account commuter crashes like the Colgan crash that could be prevented by proper training, is still less than driving a car.
Or no jobs. After finishing a 14 hour day yesterday (and I was ill to boot), i finally logged on to free republic to find out that reconciliation is one step closer. I plan to retire, sell or walk away from my house, buy a small place up in the mountains and enjoy time with my husband (who will also retire if Obamacare goes through)
Normally we would plan on working 10-15 years longer, but it is no longer worth it. I will have to give up a nice retirement, but the trade-off is worth it.
Yes, but interns have residents and seasoned physicians called attendings looking over their shoulders. There is no one in the cockpit with the green pilots.
It’s not how hard it is to handle an aircraft emergency, it’s how often you HAVE to handle an emergency.
The bus blows a tire at ANY point — it could crash. The bus hits a bad pothole and breaks an axle. The bus is hit by a truck. A car swerves in front of the bus. The bus catches fire. The bus driver falls asleep. A car coming the other direction swerves across the road in front of the bus. A deer runs across the road in front of the bus.
Did you know that the death rate from buses is 25 TIMES that of commercial airplanes? In 2008, 583 people were killed in airplane accidents. In 2006, 331 people were killed in bus crashes, even though the number of bus passengers is dwarfed by the number of airline passengers.
In 2008, I quickly found 4 bus crashes, all of which suggest that a more experienced, highly paid, intelligent driver could have prevented the accidents. IN thsoe for crashes, the death tolls ranged from 9 to 64 passengers. In one case 54 passengers burned to death.
So while you can MOCK the need for skilled, trained, experienced bus drivers, the FACT is that spending money to improve bus driver skills would be more cost-effective if we want to save lives then spending extra money on a couple hundred hours more of experience for airline pilots.
It’s all about relative risk. And in the end, I believe that most airline passengers, seeing that the average deaths per year in airlines is under 1000, won’t be interested in spending an extra 10-20 bucks per ticket to lower their absolute risk of death by 0.1%.
Do you believe that only a few thousand people in the United States have the ability to learn how to pass the multi-engine instrumental rating tests? Or is it more likely that most people simply never get the chance, or simply have no interest in, doing so?
What is so HARD about it? Does it require a PHD? Would a person have to have an IQ of over 150?
I would hope that is why they would pair inexperience co-pilots with more experienced pilots.
Of course, sometimes that doesn’t help, if the experienced pilot makes stupid decisions and lets the co-pilot crash the plane.
Yes. What’s so hard about it is the level of complication, multi-engine planes are hideously complicated devises that the pilot has an extreme high level of control over. Imagine if with just the flick of some switches you could change every single aspect of how your cars wheels interacted with the road, individually, on the fly, and you HAD to do that in order to drive. Then add being able to change how body of the car was shaped, altering your aerodynamic signature to the point where you can actually steer it... in 3 dimensions. That’s life in a multi-engine plane. Then add the ability to do all without being able to look out the windows, that’s instrument rated.
I used to have a computer boot sequence that required almost a kibuki-dance of flipping switches and pushing buttons.
Of course, nobody was going to die if I got it wrong. :-)
Are they harder than military jets? I know military jets are hard to fly, but it is my understanding that we have managed to teach non-college-educated people how to do it.
I have no doubt there is a lot of learning to fly a jet, but it still seems like it’s a lot of rote learning. A pilot doesn’t have to come up with a new WAY of flying, right, just learn how every other pilot would throw all the switches and set all the settings for a particular circumstance?
Maybe my distinction isn’t obvious. Maybe most pilots could, with the proper college education, do any other job they wanted as well. I just haven’t known anybody who said they wanted to be a pilot, who came back months later and said they failed at it because they weren’t smart enough.
These pilots flying turboprops and RJ’s aren’t wealthy and don’t have side businesses ,, they are living on Ramen noodles and driving 20 year old Chevy Cavaliers.
And you weren’t traveling at a serious percentage of the speed of sound.
Multi-engine jets are tough, military or civilian, instrument licensing is tough, military or civilian. Nobody said anything about having to be college educated, there’s plenty of hard stuff out there that doesn’t need college education.
It’s not rote learning, it’s teaching instinct. 99.9% of all non-combat flying is the most boring job in human history. But then there’s comes the other .1%, the times they have to ditch in the Hudson, or land in fog with 40MPH winds across the runway. Just like when something bad happens in your car the difference between surviving and not is instinct, the guys that have it live, the guys that don’t don’t. You can train instinct, but it takes many hours to do so.
How many of the people you know went all the way to multi-engine instrument licensing? Probably none. It’s a lot more training, a lot more money, and takes a lot more smarts.
Once the magic hour limit is reached, send an application to the airlines and wait for a call-back. Based on buddies that have gone in the past few years, there would then be a technical interview, then a simulator session to check your flying skills, followed by a personnel interview. Then you're notified in one way or another.
Depending on the school you trained at (or if you used a freelance instructor), you would then have from 150hrs to 275hrs of flight time in that year of training.
The next step to meet the new hour requirement of 1500 total time would be to get hired by someone that owns their own plane or get your flight instructor ratings. Add another 30hrs or so and another six months of study to get the licenses to train someone else to do what you just did.
Now you're between 200 and 300 hrs with 1200 to 1300 more hours to go. Upon reaching the hour requirement of 1500, you'll need to learn about jet engines, high altitude weather, performance chart interpretation, advanced navigation systems, specific airline operating specs etc. once at the airlines.
The flying part is easy, just as learning to drive a car was easy for most. Operating high-dollar jets and learning to deal with emergency situations as a matter of routine takes years. The years spent on this 'easy' profession equates to safety in the long run, just as the years of patience that a teacher puts in is valuable and aids in education.
Could you hire a fresh college grad to do what you do, with no transition time beyond earning the degree?
You probably made a good decision for your situation. If you're ever in FL and need a BFR let me know!
Hate to say it, but the fat one has a point.
Paying a pilot that low of a wage means they have to have a second or third job. A tired out pilot is a recipe for disaster.
I presume the guys who are now airline pilots went that far. I presume the ones that are just personal pilots did not. I have no idea if the guy that flew fighter jets did or not.
Fighter jet pilots tend to be instrument rated. And they can tell you about the wash out rate. Instrument rating is probably one of the hardest things in the world, it not only takes smarts and instinct, but massive ego. Nobody who doesn’t have an insane level of self confidence would take a plane off, fly it to another airport using dead reckoning to get you close enough to the airport beacon to navigate by radio, and land it all without being able to look out the window (well almost all, you get a little bit of window action at the end of final approach).
A guy I know took a trip to Europe several,yrs agp. He said a tour guy in Germany told him, ‘’we have Drs. who moonlight driving a cab’’. Ah, theb
glorys of socialism.
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