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.
I have always appreciated your reasoned discussions on this forum, but today I have to disagree with you. My brother is a commercial airline pilot, who also flew almost 20 years with the Air Force in air transport prior to leaving for a "good paying" job in the airlines, right before 9/11. Since then he has been laid off twice and is at the bottom of the pay scale, at a major airline, not a commuter. He has had to take on a second job to make ends meet. The safety issue does not have to do with the fact that they won't fly as safely as they can when they are flying at low pay. It is that they are tired. Tired people aren't at their best to make split-second decisions. Yes, captains, on the old pay scale, make decent money, but those coming on now, on the second tier pay scale, aren't making a salary where they can support themselves on one job. I would rather pay a little more for a ticket and know my pilots are fresh.