Dear Airlines and Unionized Pilots

I think this might help to understand the OP's mindset...

future777captain said:
I am a 28 (almost 29) year old career changer. My training in B.C. Canada is set to begin full time in September. I've scrimped and saved since I finished university 5 years back and now I have the funds available to get me there. But I tell you being a wannabe pilot in North America is the toughtest thing in the world. If you consider European and Asian pilots who are trained by their own airlines and work for life there compared to here where it is all on you to graduate the programs on your own dime with no guarantee of a job.
As my avatar says I am a future 777 captain. I don't even want to work in North America really. The best jobs are with carriers like Singapore Airlines or Emirates. Naturally speaking those jobs are hard to get. Nowadays Air Canada is hurting for pilots so there is a good place to start.
Compared to the minimum wage jobs that got me here I can hardly wait to have a job I look forward to going to and gives me pride. A few months ago when I was studying part time my instructor let me do the take off, landing, turns, navigation, and tower talk all by myself. For you pros I know it is just another day at the office but for me that day is when I felt I became a real pilot.
I can hardly wait to be professionally certified.
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future777captain said:
Forward this to all of your managers and let them have a review of themselves.
Dear Airline Managers:
If you need pilots, step up to the plate and help us out. These are expensive days to be studying aviation.

Dear unionized airline pilots,
For guys who only work 85 hours a month and get all sorts of benefits and salary, you sure do whine a lot. ....
I will be a pilot one day. If I can get even as much as $30,000 a year to captain a cutting edge aircraft, I will be grateful as anything for the opportunity to do what I have always wanted to do.
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I wish you good luck in your career aspirations 777. Thanks for your thoughts.

It will be interesting to see your perspective in another 10 years. I have a pretty good idea what it will be. Please stick around this forum. There is a lot you will learn.

I would say this... Be careful what you wish for. In theory, if all airlines did ab initio pilot training, the market would be even more flooded with pilots. You would in fact be lucky to make $30000 a year.

But I strongly doubt this would ever happen in the US or Canada. Training is expensive, time consuming, and does not pay dividends for long time. It is an immediate cost showing up on a company's quarterly reports balance sheet. With the investor community and airline BODs are so focused on immediate rewards, I think they'd rather YOU bare the risk and cost of training.

Also...

There is a glut of pilots at the moment.

There was a glut of pilots yesterday.

There was a glut of pilots last year.

There has always been a glut of pilots.

There will always be a glut of pilots.

The pilot shortage is a myth.

And major airline managers will always want to hire 30 year old pilots, with 10000 hours TT, with 9700 hours multi-engine large turbojet PIC and 3 lunar landings in the last 90 days.................for $30000 a year......who will pay for their own training and type ratings.


$30000 a year, in Canadian or US dollars.....

You live in BC. How you gonna live on $30k a year? How far does $30k go living in YVR? About 3 months?

I suppose if you were living in Army subsidized base housing, with all your meals and healthcare paid for, it could work. Or if you were living in a college area house with 7 of your buddies. Heck that would be fun! I long for those days!

Here is a question for you: With rare exception, every single pilot group in the world is unionized. Why do you think that is?

Your post expresses passionate thougths about this industry. That is good. You'll need that passion to drive you through to process of becoming a pilot. You will want to quit at times. And yeah, it sux that training is so expensive and there is no guarantee it will ever pay off. My bet is that in 10 years, if you pursue aviation and land a job, you will be a union volunteer. Strike Committe?
 
Future777captain,

Did you get those two "letters" from somewhere else? because i'm not quite sure why you would want people to forward them to their management...that makes this seem as though you didn't actually write it....
 
JetsGoWhee said:
:banghead:That mindset right there is what's pulling this industry down. PLEASE change your mind on that and educate yourself before making statements like this, and pretty much your entire post, in the future.
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Instead of telling him to "get educated" why not educate him?
 
Sorry Chris, it was late. . .and well. . .reading such a ridiculous "letter" doesn't really yield itself to generating enough power in my soul to provide any sort of "education."

Plus, I'm just a new hire - so obviously my input would be null and void.
 
future777captain said:
I will be a pilot one day. If I can get even as much as $30,000 a year to captain a cutting edge aircraft, I will be grateful as anything for the opportunity to do what I have always wanted to do.
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Congratulations, you are willing to work poverty level wages to fly an airplane.

I've worked unskilled labor before. I made more money and worked less than as a pilot. So you can take your high and mighty attitude and stick it somewhere else.
 
Screaming_Emu said:
Instead of telling him to "get educated" why not educate him?
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There are tens of thousands of posts on this website that he could read to educate himself. The search function is a beautiful thing. He's also been a member for about a year already. I think he's probably read quite a bit. We can help educate someone, but we can't completely spoon feed. There is a wealth of information here. He should take advantage of it rather than writing derogatory letters to us.
 
Well future777captain, you have all sorts of feedback to your post. Don't you have anything else to say? Are we all wrong?
 
or IS this flamebait? you can typically tell if it's flamebait if the OP never comes back to converse about the subject. ;)
 
Sorry y'all, I just got back from work, reading the posts. They are certainly all very interesting and for sure all have great points too.
Airplanes have been a passion of mine since I was 7. I spent elementary school in Kenya, and I would go with my dad to the airport (he was a World Food Programme pilot) every weekend, and like any fascinated boy, I would watch the big heavies take off and land from the UN hangar. Of course, I naturally carried that passion through high school, but I got discouraged my watching my dad lose his job (furloughed) 7 times, and his friends companies also going bankrupt. So I thought it would be better just to go to university and try to get a stable job. Unfortunally, after graduation, I drifted to the army, then teaching underprivelaged kids in a ghetto area of Seoul, South Korea. It was during my first flight to Seoul that I became suddenly re-enthralled with aviation passion, I was in business class in the upper hub of the 747, I could catch glimpses of the cockpit and all the glass equipment that I didn't know airplanes had.
I was there for 4 years, trying to save every penny to eventually go to flight school, while at the same time taking abuse from the kids and the system, but you know, it's never easy being a teacher. Of course, at the end of the day it does have it's rewards. (If you think Korean kids are smart nerdy kids, think again)
Sometime in 2004 there was a Korean Air/Asiana strike. The pilots were complaining about salary. They only made $5,000 a month to start, but they wanted 8,000. I looked at my measly minimum wage teaching job with ghetto kids, and looked at the pilots with disgust. I was angry at them for living my dream and at the same time complaining that their large starting salary is not large enough. I thought about how they just don't understand how they look on the other side. Regardless to say, most people just spat on them when they marched down the street and called him 'ARISTOCRATIC COMPLAINERS.' (translated from Korean)
It's really hard to explain how desperately I want to just fly planes for a living. When I go to flight school, I usually start 8 am, and leave at 11 pm. I don't care about the long hours. I just want to get paid for it someday. When pilots complain about their working hours or bad conditions, I just question their commitment to the field.
I feel they already get treated with respect from society and only the lowest time pilots really struggle to make ends meet. I am expecting the same thing for myself. But with your license you can work ANYwhere in the world.
But I don't have any 'holier than thou' attitude. If you think so, you are wrong.
BTW, someone asked if I did write those letters. Yes, I wrote them and they are my original thoughts.
 
Alright, when you get to that "dream job" of yours, would you rather make 96k/year like those Asiana guys struck for or the 30k/year that you are proclaiming is great?

I'd go with over three times the salary myself.
 
Future777Captain I'm a career changer just like you; I love airplanes since I was 6 years old just like you. However I would NOT sell my dignity for flying an airplane. And that includes the "I will fly for peanuts" attitude that you seem to display. I really hope that if you ever become an airline pilot that you don't do something like paying for job or, GOD FORBID, be a scab.
If I were in your shoes I would READ CAREFULLY the responses to this thread. You've gotten responses from a wide range of people in aviation; from noobs like me to regional and major airline pilots. You know you're going into a highly unionized profession right?
 
Fact: I was making more than $30K as a ramper. Why in the name of Zeus would I be happy making that as a CA of a 121 airliner after I'd spent tens of thousands of dollars on training? A ramper need a HS diploma or a GED to get hired. An airline CA needs to pass a PPL, IR, CMEL, 121 SIC, and 121 PIC/ATP checkrides MINIMUM. Then you have to maintain that medical every 6 months. Oh, yeah. And you have to go to the sim every 6 months to prove you can still do the job you were hired for.

Sorry, if I was gonna be happy with $30K, I'd stay a ramper and not deal with the stress. This is the same argument we've heard countless times before. Pilots are overpaid. I love flying so much, I'd do it for free. Etc, etc. Tell ya what. After you've paid for all the training and are actually flying the line, tell us if you think we're overpaid. We don't get paid the money to fly the plane, we get paid b/c of all the BS we had to go through to get here and the BS we have to deal with on a daily basis to insure we're gonna be employed tomorrow.

Now, if you could pull someone off the street with zero time in an airplane and have them in the left seat of a CRJ in two weeks, I'd say $30K is a fair rate. But that's not gonna happen.
 
Airlines are a risky enterprise. When times are good, the company makes money hand-over-fist, the fuel companies sell gas to lots of customers, and lots of pilots, F/As, rampers, and agents are working lots of hours.

When it goes bad, it goes bad in a big way: pay cuts, layoffs, and bankruptcy. By accepting a (lower) wage comparable to a more stable industry you're taking a pass on the chance to make good money when the times are good, while still exposing yourself to the same risk of being hit a downturn (effectively lowering your average pay to a level below that more-stable industry). Being a lower "cost of production" to management won't stave-off the effects of a weak dollar, monotonically increasing fuel prices, idiotic fare wars, or a dropoff in people needing to travel. Those are all facts of life in this line of work.

You will have invested a lot to hold a job that might not be there in five years and almost certainly won't have a retirement plan when you turn 65. It is only right to expect a bigger payoff for assuming more risk. If the airlines don't like pilot pay, lower the risk (or find a bunch of suckers to take advantage of).
 
777,

I think pilots as a whole are actually a pretty reasonable group who just want to be paid a fair share for the critical responsibilties they perform to generate revenue for the company. How many times have we seen pilot groups give concessions to keep the company in business, only to find management giving themselves bonuses and then walking away with multi-million dollar severences packages? Pilots have a certain skill set without which the airlines cannot operate and fulfill their primary aim of appeasing their shareholders--doesn't that deserve fair compensation above the poverty line?

So, it's really about distribution of wealth--should greedy corporate executives be able to nickle and dime the employees and reap the benefits of income generated by the labor force, or should employees fight for a certain industry standard rate of compensation? So, how is fair compensation determined? That's the point of negotiations. We bring a certain value to the table, and if the company chooses not to offer just compensation, then the airline ceases to operate ala Korean/Asiana as you mentioned.

It's about defending the profession, not only from these greedy corporations, but from those who would undercut us by working for pennies on the dollar to fly shiny jets. At the end of the day, it's a job, this is a business,we go there to make money, so we can put food on the table. I feel terrible about the underprivileged kids in Korea and the rest of the world you speak of, and I sincerely hope they fight tooth and nail for their families to climb out of poverty. But if I don't defend my profession, I risk having my kids grow up to live in that very situation you speak of. And that's not happening if I have any control over it.
 
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