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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?

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.

But again, you are saying that it is the experience, not the amount they are paid, that makes them safe or not safe.

Do you think that a pilot will fly more safely if his paycheck is bigger? Will it make him appreciate the passengers’ lives more if he’s paid better? Will he concentrate more on doing his job correctly if he has more money in his wallet?

I think your actual argument supports making pilots have more hours of flying before they are made pilots; it also supports requiring better refressher training for pilots so they know when and when NOT to give co-pilots the experience they need to move up.

And if requiring more hours somehow reduces the number of job applicants, and that means the airlines have to pay more to attract people to the job, then they will get paid more. But they won’t be paid more simply because they have more hours of training. They’ll get paid more because that’s what the airlines will have to do to hire the pilots.

Of course, if the union just sets the salaries, then who knows how or why the pilots will get paid any particular amount.

As a free-market person, I would prefer if we limited regulation in this area to requiring airlines to give to passengers both the hours of training the pilots on their plane have, as well as government statistics showing the probability of crash as related to the number of hours of training a pilot has.

Then the passengers can decide if the money they are saving on their tickets is worth the risk.

Is there even a good chart that shows the number of airline passenger deaths as a function of the number of total hours of flight time booked by the pilots of the planes that crashed?

That would be interesting, and would go a long way toward supporting the argument for more hours — if the slope of the curve showed that there was a some knee in the curve that could be used to set those hours.

If the graph is a straight line, it would be a problem, since that would argue that every additional hour required saved as many lives as the previous, which would mean that if you could justify one extra hour, you could justify every additional hour, through infinity.

But I’m guessing there is some nice curve, and that at some point additional experience really doesn’t matter.

But i’m also betting that, contrary to what is being said here, the knee of the curve may actually BE close to the current regulation, and far from the new proposed hours.

Here is a study I just ran across, haven't had a chance to read it much yet, which suggests improvements in safety through thousands of hours of experience. Age, Flight Experience, and Risk of Crash. Abstract:

Federal aviation regulations prohibit airline pilots from flying beyond the age of 60 years. However, the relation between pilot age and flight safety has not been rigorously assessed using empirical data. From 1987 to 1997, the authors followed a cohort of 3,306 commuter air carrier and air taxi pilots who were aged 45–54 years in 1987. During the follow-up period, the pilots accumulated a total of 12.9 million flight hours and 66 aviation crashes, yielding a rate of 5.1 crashes per million pilot flight hours. Crash risk remained fairly stable as the pilots aged from their late forties to their late fifties. Flight experience, as measured by total flight time at baseline, showed a significant protective effect against the risk of crash involvement. With adjustment for age, pilots who had 5,000–9,999 hours of total flight time at baseline had a 57% lower risk of a crash than their less experienced counterparts (relative risk = 0.43, 95% confidence interval: 0.21, 0.87). The protective effect of flight experience leveled off after total flight time reached 10,000 hours. The lack of an association between pilot age and crash risk may reflect a strong "healthy worker effect" stemming from the rigorous medical standards and periodic physical examinations required for professional pilots.

If this study is accurate, it sounds like the knee of the curve is at around 10,000 hours of experience. So I guess we should require pilots to have 10,000 hours before letting them fly people. :-)