Cockpit Confidential (18 page)

And lastly, pilots must keep up to date with a never-ending flow of paperwork—an administrative blizzard of operational memos, bulletins, and revisions to our books. Seldom a day goes by without
something
changing.

Yes and no; mostly no. Although management and training staff are occasionally cross-qualified, the rank and file is assigned to one specific aircraft. In a few instances, certification to fly different models is the same, as with the Airbus A330/A340 and Boeing 757/767, but these planes were designed with dual-qualification in mind and are exceptions to the rule. There are enormous differences between aircraft types, and switching from one to another entails a lengthy syllabus of classroom and simulator training. At the moment, I fly the 757 and 767. If you threw me into the cockpit of an Airbus A320, I'd be hard pressed to get an engine started.

Transitioning to another model, or upgrading from first officer to captain of the same model, pilots undergo a complete training regimen. Even if you've previously checked out on a particular plane, you'll sweat through an extensive requalification program.

You'll often hear about pilots making upward of $200,000 a year. These are the fellows who airlines and pundits love to make examples of during contract negotiations. In truth, a very small portion of all pilots out there make this much—the gray-haired captains nearing retirement, on the highest rungs of a major carrier's seniority ladder. Seldom do you hear about the pilots making thirty, forty, or sixty thousand. Or, at the regionals, twenty thousand.

There are those of us who make a decent living, but believe me, it didn't come easy, and overall the profession isn't nearly as lucrative as it once was. According to the Air Line Pilots Association and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average airline pilot salary in the United States fell 42 percent between 1977 and 2010. The biggest drop came in the years between 2002 and 2007, when carriers slashed wages by 20 percent or more. On top of this, pensions have been gutted and benefits cut.

Annual starting salaries at the majors are around $30,000. Even with yearly raises, it takes eight or ten years' tenure before you'll earn six figures. That is, provided a pilot is lucky enough to reach that level. Most who set their sights on the majors never get that far and have to settle for a career at the regionals, where the pay is considerably lower. A junior copilot on a RJ might earn as little as $19,000 a year. Senior captains top out around $100,000.

Readers should be cautious of sources citing “average” pilot salaries. Those averages might pertain only to certain sectors of the industry—the major carriers, for instance, neglecting the approximately 40 percent of airline pilots who work at the regionals. They also fail to explain that a given pilot is liable to be in his fifties by the time he earns his captain stripe and a respectable income, after decades of mediocre pay and perhaps a layoff or two.

Another thing to be leery of are quotes of hourly pay rates. While it's true that most pilots are compensated by the hour, these are
flight
hours, not work hours as most people think of them. A hundred dollars an hour might seem extravagant, but it is engineered to account for the off-the-clock ancillaries of the job: preflight planning, downtime between connections, and periods laying over in hotels. Only a portion of a typical multiday assignment is spent in the air. Over the course of a month, perhaps 80 hours of actual flying are recorded, but a pilot might be
on duty
for 250 hours and away from home for two weeks or more. This disparity spawns the idea that airline pilots work far less than the typical full-time employee. I once heard a radio commentator remark snarkily about pilots “only working seventy hours a month.” A pilot works seventy hours a month the way a pro football player works an hour each week.

How much do
you
think a pilot should be paid? What is your passage worth? That's a tough one to answer, and it sets up a trap. Does a baseball player deserve $10 million a year? Or, turning it around, does a teacher or a social worker deserve $24,000? That's making a moral judgment on a market-determined product. Pilots aren't paid what they're worth; they're paid what they can
get
, through negotiation and collective bargaining. But, just for fun, pretend you're traveling from New York to San Francisco on an airline whose pilots are compensated by voluntary passenger donations. A cup is passed around at the conclusion of each flight. How much is safe transport across the continent worth to you? How much would you put in the cup?

In practice, you're putting in about twelve dollars. When you average out the pay rates of the biggest airlines, the captain of a Boeing 767 (a typical plane for this route) makes $190 per flight hour. The plane has 210 seats, and the flight lasts six hours. That hashes out to a contribution of $5.42 per seat. The average flight is 80 percent full, which brings it to $6.78 per passenger. The captain gets just under seven dollars of your fare. The first officer gets around $5.00.

Now let's try a regional. It varies with seniority, but you can expect the captain of a sixty-five-seater to make around $95 per flight hour. For a ninety-minute flight, you've given him $2.74. The copilot gets slightly better than a dollar.

Flying, it has been said, is a lot like acting, painting, or playing minor league ball (or trying your luck at writing a book). Reward awaits the fortunate, but countless others toil in extended purgatory for their art. The trick is to grab a seniority number (
see next question
) as quickly as possible and hope for the best. Rewards come later, not sooner, and though risks are inherent in many professions, aviation is especially unpredictable and unforgiving. Nevertheless, and despite the setbacks endured over the course of my own career, I'm obliged to admit that I enjoy my job tremendously. A berth at a major airline, at least when the ink is running black and people aren't flying planes into buildings, is still a good one.

This, and several questions that follow, require an understanding of the airline seniority system. In the United States and many other countries, all of a pilot's quality-of-life variables are determined via seniority bidding, based on date of hire. Our destiny has almost nothing to do with merit and everything to do with timing. Experience and skill, for all of their intangible value, are effectively meaningless.
Seniority
is the currency of value. Nothing is more important than, as we call it, our “number.” We bid our preferences for position (captain or first officer), aircraft type, base city, monthly schedule, vacations, and so on. What we're ultimately assigned comes down to our relative position within the ranks: our number within the airline overall; our number in a particular base; our number within a specific aircraft category; our number, number, number.

First officers become captains only when a slot becomes available, and only when seniority permits them to. How talented you are, or how swell a person you are, will not earn you a faster track to the left seat. Neither will how many lives you managed to save in the throes of some emergency. Only your number can do that.

I should point out that not every pilot whose seniority permits an upgrade to captain will opt for it. The transition from first officer to captain means you're going from the top of one category to the bottom of another. You'll probably be getting a raise, but not necessarily, and once you account for schedule, the places you're likely to fly, and so on, you might have a better lifestyle remaining as a senior first officer than you would as a junior captain. Thus it's not terribly unusual to find copilots who are senior to, and more experienced than, many captains.

The seniority system is not as rigid in every country, though many follow all or part of the U.S. model. And with minor variations, flight attendants work within an almost identical framework. It's at once fair and unfair, the ultimate insult and the ultimate egalitarian tool—dehumanizing, maddening, and immensely important. It's important for the reasons just listed, and also because, if a pilot is laid off or his airline goes bust, his years of accrued tenure become meaningless. Seniority is never transferable from airline to airline. Any time a pilot changes airlines, he starts over at the
bottom
of the list, at probationary pay and benefits, regardless of experience. The long, slow climb begins again. This is industry standard, and there are no exceptions—not for Chesley Sullenberger, not for a former NASA astronaut, not for anybody. When the pilots of Eastern, Braniff, Pan Am, and a hundred other belly-up carriers suddenly found themselves on the street, their choice was an ugly one: start over as a rookie, as it were, or find another career.

If business is bad and airlines are contracting, seniority moves in reverse: captains become first officers; and
junior
first officers become cab drivers. In the rickety profit/loss roller coaster that is the airline industry, layoffs—furloughs, as we call them—come and go in waves, displacing thousands at a time. Following the 2001 terrorist attacks, more than ten thousand airline pilots were furloughed in the United States, yours truly among them. Many are yet to return. When it happens, a portion of an airline's pilot seniority roster, which is to say everybody at the bottom, per date of hire, is lopped away. If cutbacks determine that 500 flyers have to go, the 501st one hired now becomes the company's most junior—and most nervous—crewmember. Some pilots are fortunate, getting on at just the right time and sliding through a long, uneventful tenure. But it's not the least bit unusual to meet pilots whose résumés are scarred by three or more demotions or furloughs, some lasting several years.

Furloughees remain nominal employees, presumably to be summoned back when conditions improve or attrition warrants their return. When and if that day comes, assuming the airline that cut you loose stays in business, you're brought back to the fold in strict seniority order—the first pilot out is the last pilot back. How long can it take? My furlough lasted five and a half years.

Pilots can reduce the risk of furlough by embracing the lucrative but less-than-glamorous realm of cargo flying. If the greasy glare of warehouse lights at 4:00 a.m. doesn't cramp your style, you can hunker down on one of the more recession-resistant seniority lists at FedEx, UPS, Atlas Air, etc. You won't be signing autographs for little kids, and your circadian might graph out a little funny, but layoffs aren't as common in the freight business.

If you're a youngster setting your sights on this mad business, expect that it
will
happen to you. When it does, try to relax; it's not the end of the world (yet). Don't join any religious cults and don't make voodoo dolls of your employer's corporate board. Don't take a job flying unexploded munitions out of Liberia, and, as gloomy as the future might seem, do not sell your wings and hat on eBay. The FBI won't like that, and you might need them again.

And not that you asked, but allow me to propose that the two greatest songs about furlough and unemployment are a couple of old school punk rock staples—the Clash's “Career Opportunities” and the Jam's “Smithers-Jones.” The former, from the Clash's eponymous debut in 1977, is a raucous tear-down of the economic malaise in late '70s Britain. The latter, written by the Jam's Bruce Foxton, tells the story of a British workingman who arrives for work one morning, optimistic and “spot on time,” only to be summoned into the office and summarily handed his walking papers.

 

“I've some news to tell you
There's no longer a position for you
Sorry Smithers-Jones.”

 

The song implodes around the word “Jones” in a crash of orchestral beauty. It also makes me nauseous and gives me the willies, because I know the feeling.

The first step is to draw a sharp divide between the major carriers and their regional affiliates. It's the latter that may have a problem. The majors, able to cull from the top ranks of the regionals and the military, will always have a surplus of highly qualified candidates to choose from. No amount of attrition, expansion, or even the impending wave of retirements you sometimes hear about will come close to depleting this supply.

At the regionals it's a different story. Tenure at a regional was once assumed to be temporary. It was a job one took before—fingers crossed—moving on to a more lucrative slot with a legacy carrier. This progression was never guaranteed, but if nothing else, it served as a carrot that kept a supply of young, talented, and highly motivated pilots moving through the ranks. That was then. The regional sector is much, much larger than it used to be, and hiring by the majors has slowed to a trickle. Many pilots are figuring out that a job with a regional means a
career
with a regional—one with limited return for the cash and commitment it takes to get there. It's not an easy life, and the pay, as we've seen, is the kind of thing that causes people to skip their school reunions.

An aspiring aviator has to ask: Is it worth sinking $50,000 or more into one's primary flight training, plus the cost of a college education, plus the time it will take to build a competitive number of flight hours (a number that, in accordance with a recent FAA ruling discussed later in this chapter, is about to rise sharply)…only to spend years toiling at poverty-level wages, with at best a marginal shot at moving to a major? For many, the answer is no. A growing number of regional pilots are bailing out of the business altogether, while the replacement pool dwindles.