Airline Pilots Still Flying, but No Longer Quite So High
New York Times 03/10/2006
Author: Matthew L. Wald
c. 2006 New York Times Company
WASHINGTON, March 9 -- Within the world of aviation, airline pilots used to be one step down from astronauts. Now they feel one step up from bus drivers.
With half the seats in the nation's airliners run by companies either in bankruptcy or limping out of it, even the pilots at the top -- the ones who are within a few years of mandatory retirement at 60, flying the big planes and earning top dollar -- are facing a new world.
Their pay and pensions have been cut, and they work more hours to earn them. In another concession to the airlines, their days are interrupted more than ever by long hours of unpaid idleness.
They say they try hard not to let these things break their concentration or interfere with their work, flying passengers by the scores or hundreds, flawlessly, around the country and the world. They have piloted their planes to a record 40 million safe takeoffs and landings across the country in the last five years, whether the airline was solvent, bankrupt or just squeaking by.
Still, the boardroom blues are working their way into the cockpit.
"My philosophy right now is, I just go to work," said an American Airlines captain who, before his company's troubles, loved to fly. On one recent trip, he flew a 6 a.m. flight from Newark to Miami, then piloted a plane from Miami to Los Angeles the next evening, then a flight back to Newark, accumulating 15 paid hours for three days on the road.
The Federal Aviation Administration limits commercial pilots on domestic flights to eight hours a day, measured from pushback until arrival at the gate. The limits are 30 hours in seven days, 100 hours a month and 1,000 hours a year. The airlines do not exceed those limits but many now schedule much closer to them.
The F.A.A. rules do not address the amount of time between flights, so a pilot could be in uniform 12 hours or more to accumulate the day's hours. Eight hours of rest time every 24 hours is required, however. And pilots feel acutely the difference between getting a month's work in 14 days versus 18 days.
"They kind of bleed us out," the American Airlines captain said, on condition he not be identified for fear of losing his job. Pilots for major airlines said they expected to be fired if they were publicly candid on the new challenges of their jobs.
One veteran United Airlines captain, who laments that when he retires in a few years his pension will be about one-fourth what he expected, said he had to shut it out of his mind to prevent the distraction from affecting his work.
After a recent takeoff from California for the long flight across the Pacific, that was all his first officer wanted to talk about. The captain said he snapped back: "You know what, can we not talk about United Airlines? All it does is cause me frustration and anger and there's nothing I can do about it. It churns my stomach."
So the two, flying in one of the world's most automated, advanced airplanes, talked about a hobby they had in common: flying single-engine planes on their days off.
The dissatisfaction at the top has not changed some basics of the field: young people still dream of flying, and people who fly small planes still aspire to fly bigger ones. Legions of laid-off pilots hope to be hired back, even at reduced pay levels.
"They must love it," said Arnold I. Barnett, a professor of management science at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said airline pilots were reacting with more fortitude than other professionals might in the same circumstances.
"I cannot fathom how faculty would react if M.I.T. abolished tenure, increased teaching loads and cut salaries by 35 percent because market conditions had changed," he said.
But senior airline pilots, in dozens of interviews, spoke about feeling depressed and struggling not to let it affect their performance.
Academics have noticed a change. "The pilots are not a happy group right now," said Paul S. Fischbeck, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Dr. Fischbeck, who flew in the Navy and has colleagues who went on to fly for the airlines, said that the change in financial circumstances and job security were good reasons to be unhappy.
But Dr. Fischbeck and others pointed out that the industry culture is such that pilots must face the hardship on their own. Other workers with health plans might seek professional counseling. With pilots licensed by the F.A.A., however, "as soon as you sign up for it, it's on your record, and you're toast."
A US Airways pilot echoed that sentiment: "If it gets reported to the F.A.A., you can forget it, you're not coming back to work, until you go through a lot. The system requires us to deal with it ourselves. That makes it very difficult to go through what we just went through."
Maxine E. Lubner, director of the Aviation Institute of York College, at the City University of New York, said that eroding morale, along with problems like "the distraction of not knowing where your pension is," could not help safety.
Neither could working longer hours, which pilots for many major airlines are now doing because of contract concessions both in the number of hours flown and the number of hours they can be made to wait on the ground between flights. Some are also flying more hours to offset their pay losses.
"I would say morale and attitude are all in that mix," Dr. Lubner said. The morale effect is probably small, she said, but "we know fatigue in itself will create poor attitude and lack of motivation and irritability."
"And there's no question that something that's a distraction is a safety threat," she said.
But she agreed there was no empirical evidence supporting that theory. Statistically, the airlines are in one of their safest periods ever, with about one fatal accident for every 15 million flights.
"With the economic turbulence that's being experienced by U.S. carriers, bankruptcy, the price of oil on every page, it's a testament to the aviation industry stakeholders and the U.S. government that we are reaching those safety levels despite enormous challenges," said Marion C. Blakey, the F.A.A. administrator, in a speech to an aviation safety conference that her agency organized last fall.
There are some warning signs, however. NASA recently told the F.A.A. of numerous reports of errors by ground personnel, a category of worker that has had heavy turnover. It also warned of reports of planes loading too little fuel.
A Northwest pilot described his own forgetfulness. "There are certain things I'm supposed to do to set up my part of the cockpit," he said. "We do the stuff first, then go back with the checklist and double-check it," he said. And in double-checking, he once found a set of switches he was certain he had set, but had not. "I thought I had turned those on," he recalled thinking. "I hadn't; I just wasn't as sharp. I'd lost my edge."
Airline executives say they do not know how to measure the effect of morale. At US Airways, Carlo Bertolini, a spokesman, said, "No one's going to deny that US Airways employees have been through a tough time, with layoffs, changes in work rules and steps lowering costs. A lot of these sacrifices came from employees."
But "we all have a stake in the safety of the airline," he added. "We're definitely confident that all employees always have safety at the top of their mind."
Pilots say the same but add that the change in schedules often means more fatigue. "You can feel yourself getting to a point where you're beginning to make more little mistakes," a senior captain at US Airways said.
"Most of the mistakes are caught very quickly, and most are very minor errors," he said. But "at that level of fatigue, after weeks or months of this without a break, it's easy to make major mistake."
Not everyone agrees that the longer working schedule is a problem.
"It's hard for me to feel sorry for them," said Capt. Jeffrey R. Hefner, the safety chairman of the union that represents pilots at Southwest Airlines, who have always flown longer hours than pilots at older airlines.
"They're a bunch of spoiled brats," he said. "Historically, this has been a really cushy job once you get to the majors. You make a lot of money and you don't have to fly a lot. But there had to be a market balancing at some point."
New York Times 03/10/2006
Author: Matthew L. Wald
c. 2006 New York Times Company
WASHINGTON, March 9 -- Within the world of aviation, airline pilots used to be one step down from astronauts. Now they feel one step up from bus drivers.
With half the seats in the nation's airliners run by companies either in bankruptcy or limping out of it, even the pilots at the top -- the ones who are within a few years of mandatory retirement at 60, flying the big planes and earning top dollar -- are facing a new world.
Their pay and pensions have been cut, and they work more hours to earn them. In another concession to the airlines, their days are interrupted more than ever by long hours of unpaid idleness.
They say they try hard not to let these things break their concentration or interfere with their work, flying passengers by the scores or hundreds, flawlessly, around the country and the world. They have piloted their planes to a record 40 million safe takeoffs and landings across the country in the last five years, whether the airline was solvent, bankrupt or just squeaking by.
Still, the boardroom blues are working their way into the cockpit.
"My philosophy right now is, I just go to work," said an American Airlines captain who, before his company's troubles, loved to fly. On one recent trip, he flew a 6 a.m. flight from Newark to Miami, then piloted a plane from Miami to Los Angeles the next evening, then a flight back to Newark, accumulating 15 paid hours for three days on the road.
The Federal Aviation Administration limits commercial pilots on domestic flights to eight hours a day, measured from pushback until arrival at the gate. The limits are 30 hours in seven days, 100 hours a month and 1,000 hours a year. The airlines do not exceed those limits but many now schedule much closer to them.
The F.A.A. rules do not address the amount of time between flights, so a pilot could be in uniform 12 hours or more to accumulate the day's hours. Eight hours of rest time every 24 hours is required, however. And pilots feel acutely the difference between getting a month's work in 14 days versus 18 days.
"They kind of bleed us out," the American Airlines captain said, on condition he not be identified for fear of losing his job. Pilots for major airlines said they expected to be fired if they were publicly candid on the new challenges of their jobs.
One veteran United Airlines captain, who laments that when he retires in a few years his pension will be about one-fourth what he expected, said he had to shut it out of his mind to prevent the distraction from affecting his work.
After a recent takeoff from California for the long flight across the Pacific, that was all his first officer wanted to talk about. The captain said he snapped back: "You know what, can we not talk about United Airlines? All it does is cause me frustration and anger and there's nothing I can do about it. It churns my stomach."
So the two, flying in one of the world's most automated, advanced airplanes, talked about a hobby they had in common: flying single-engine planes on their days off.
The dissatisfaction at the top has not changed some basics of the field: young people still dream of flying, and people who fly small planes still aspire to fly bigger ones. Legions of laid-off pilots hope to be hired back, even at reduced pay levels.
"They must love it," said Arnold I. Barnett, a professor of management science at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said airline pilots were reacting with more fortitude than other professionals might in the same circumstances.
"I cannot fathom how faculty would react if M.I.T. abolished tenure, increased teaching loads and cut salaries by 35 percent because market conditions had changed," he said.
But senior airline pilots, in dozens of interviews, spoke about feeling depressed and struggling not to let it affect their performance.
Academics have noticed a change. "The pilots are not a happy group right now," said Paul S. Fischbeck, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Dr. Fischbeck, who flew in the Navy and has colleagues who went on to fly for the airlines, said that the change in financial circumstances and job security were good reasons to be unhappy.
But Dr. Fischbeck and others pointed out that the industry culture is such that pilots must face the hardship on their own. Other workers with health plans might seek professional counseling. With pilots licensed by the F.A.A., however, "as soon as you sign up for it, it's on your record, and you're toast."
A US Airways pilot echoed that sentiment: "If it gets reported to the F.A.A., you can forget it, you're not coming back to work, until you go through a lot. The system requires us to deal with it ourselves. That makes it very difficult to go through what we just went through."
Maxine E. Lubner, director of the Aviation Institute of York College, at the City University of New York, said that eroding morale, along with problems like "the distraction of not knowing where your pension is," could not help safety.
Neither could working longer hours, which pilots for many major airlines are now doing because of contract concessions both in the number of hours flown and the number of hours they can be made to wait on the ground between flights. Some are also flying more hours to offset their pay losses.
"I would say morale and attitude are all in that mix," Dr. Lubner said. The morale effect is probably small, she said, but "we know fatigue in itself will create poor attitude and lack of motivation and irritability."
"And there's no question that something that's a distraction is a safety threat," she said.
But she agreed there was no empirical evidence supporting that theory. Statistically, the airlines are in one of their safest periods ever, with about one fatal accident for every 15 million flights.
"With the economic turbulence that's being experienced by U.S. carriers, bankruptcy, the price of oil on every page, it's a testament to the aviation industry stakeholders and the U.S. government that we are reaching those safety levels despite enormous challenges," said Marion C. Blakey, the F.A.A. administrator, in a speech to an aviation safety conference that her agency organized last fall.
There are some warning signs, however. NASA recently told the F.A.A. of numerous reports of errors by ground personnel, a category of worker that has had heavy turnover. It also warned of reports of planes loading too little fuel.
A Northwest pilot described his own forgetfulness. "There are certain things I'm supposed to do to set up my part of the cockpit," he said. "We do the stuff first, then go back with the checklist and double-check it," he said. And in double-checking, he once found a set of switches he was certain he had set, but had not. "I thought I had turned those on," he recalled thinking. "I hadn't; I just wasn't as sharp. I'd lost my edge."
Airline executives say they do not know how to measure the effect of morale. At US Airways, Carlo Bertolini, a spokesman, said, "No one's going to deny that US Airways employees have been through a tough time, with layoffs, changes in work rules and steps lowering costs. A lot of these sacrifices came from employees."
But "we all have a stake in the safety of the airline," he added. "We're definitely confident that all employees always have safety at the top of their mind."
Pilots say the same but add that the change in schedules often means more fatigue. "You can feel yourself getting to a point where you're beginning to make more little mistakes," a senior captain at US Airways said.
"Most of the mistakes are caught very quickly, and most are very minor errors," he said. But "at that level of fatigue, after weeks or months of this without a break, it's easy to make major mistake."
Not everyone agrees that the longer working schedule is a problem.
"It's hard for me to feel sorry for them," said Capt. Jeffrey R. Hefner, the safety chairman of the union that represents pilots at Southwest Airlines, who have always flown longer hours than pilots at older airlines.
"They're a bunch of spoiled brats," he said. "Historically, this has been a really cushy job once you get to the majors. You make a lot of money and you don't have to fly a lot. But there had to be a market balancing at some point."
