Delta Pilot's Brilliant CEO sticker!

[FL270]

Re: Delta Pilot\'s Brilliant CEO sticker!

On another message board, a user (who happens to be a Delta pilot) did this analysis of pay rates at several airlines ... it is revealing.

I don't have a Delta contract in front of me, so I'm going to pull salary numbers out of the air. In a few hours, I'll board a RDU-CVG flight on Delta, on an MD-88. The aircraft has 142 seats. Let's say the Captain earns $160 per hour and the FO $110. Each flight attendant earns $30. Once again ... these are just guesstimates ... but should be approximately accurate for illustration purposes. So, the captain earns $1.13 per seat per hour. The FO earns $0.77. Each FA earns $0.21. The total compensation of the crew per seat per hour would be $2.53 (three FAs). The flight is blocked at 1+32. For the flight, the total compensation from one seat to the crew is $3.88. For the entire aircraft, the crew costs Delta $552 for the flight.

Now, I paid $229 for my ticket, which is a four-leg trip from RDU-CVG-PIT and back. Delta actually gets about $180 of that, the rest being government taxes and the like. 25% of that applies to the one flight I've illustrated above. So, I paid to Delta $45, hypothetically speaking, for this one leg. A little under $4 pays for the entire crew.

This example is grossly oversimplified, of course. But, if 100 seats are filled on the plane today, and the average fare collected for this leg is $60 (remembering that most of the pax will probably be connecting and flying round-trip), Delta collected $6000 in revenue for providing this flight. The crew cost $552. Even after benefits, etc., there's another $5000 out there from this one flight. Doesn't seem to me like the cost of the labor is the big problem ... the problem is two-fold. Poor control of costs in other areas (executive compensation may be one) and (as any airline boss will tell you) a weak revenue environment with almost zero pricing power.

In other words, if you take your scissors and cut two blades of grass, does it make your whole yard look any better?

FL270

 

[Heath]

Re: Delta Pilot\'s Brilliant CEO sticker!

Yeah, just because Chris Pummer, or whatever his name was, said it's so, it MUST be true!

I'm just sick of hearing people quote a pilot's hourly wage and then state that they're overpaid. A) They always quote the highest wage of the most senior captain at the best paid airline. That's like stating that attorneys make $20,000 an hour just because there are 4 in New York that do. B) Almost no one understands in the general public that your hourly wage is only for flight hours, even though you have to be on the job and away from home for MUCH more than that. Imagine telling a salesperson that he has to travel away from home 4 nights a week, report at the home office for an 80 hour work week, BUT you're only going to pay him for the hours that he's sitting in front of a prospect making a sales pitch. I wonder if Chris would accept a job where he had to fulfill all of his reporting duties, but was only paid when he was sitting at his desk typing a story for marketwatch?

The bottom line is, and I'm preaching to the choir here, airline pilots put in long hours and sacrifice a ton of time away from home and loved ones for the paycheck they make. And even $250,000 isn't a very big salary for the amount of time that it takes you to earn it, not even getting into the years of earning sub-par wages and the forced retirement at 60. If you put in that kind of time at a sales job, you could WAY out earn $250,000 (tell me again why I want to do this for a living?

).

Maybe Delta might have to lower pilot pay in order to keep costs below revenue, but as has been said, it's a slap in the face for any management to ask employees to do that while they're earning more than a pilots annual salary in one month, and they're not taking any reduction whatsoever. Personally, the only way I'd agree to a paycut is if it were done on a percentage basis and applied to every employee in the company equally. Everyone's in the same boat together.

That's just my .02 worth.

Heath

 

[TheWife]

Re: Delta Pilot\'s Brilliant CEO sticker!

I don't know all the details and inside info and what not, but if I knew my CEO was paid that much, and I was paid about nothing, I'd be considering a strike.

 

[tonyw]

Re: Delta Pilot\'s Brilliant CEO sticker!

[ QUOTE ]
Imagine telling a salesperson that he has to travel away from home 4 nights a week, report at the home office for an 80 hour work week, BUT you're only going to pay him for the hours that he's sitting in front of a prospect making a sales pitch.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd have two words for that employer. Well, two choices of them, anyway.

The printable ones are "I quit."

You can figure out the unprintable ones, can't you?

 

[derg]

Re: Delta Pilot\'s Brilliant CEO sticker!

[ QUOTE ]
It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone why most people don't post here. If you have an opinion that doesn't fit with everyone else, you will be attacked and called a troll.


[/ QUOTE ]

A couple of clarifications before I depart DFW for LGA-

I'm not breathlessly looking for traffic, au contraire. But the people that lurk and feel that they haven't much to offer when in fact they do are the ones I'm trying to speak up a little for their own benefit.

However, if 99% of someone's posts are inflammatory or what I, as the owner of the website, deem to be anti-pilot, I may choose to label that user a troll so some of the other users don't get worked up and incite a verbal riot.

For a volunteer Click on Medflyer's profile and select "view all posts from users".

If I've mistaken labeled you a 'troll', I'll publically apologize.

 

[Kristie]

Re: Delta Pilot\'s Brilliant CEO sticker!

[ QUOTE ]
Maybe Doug could reiterate how much money he sees from a given paid ticket?

[/ QUOTE ]

From what i know.. it's about $1.20 per passenger ticket... figure each person pays $200 + per ticket, not even 1%...

 

[AirborneMedic_ANGa10]

Re: Delta Pilot\'s Brilliant CEO sticker!

You can also put it this way: If every passenger on a fully loaded 763 tips the f/o $1 and the capt $2 after a 2 hour flight, the crew would make more money on the tips than they do with their hourly flight rate. Clear as mud?