A Pilot’s Life: Exhausting Hours for Meager Wages
January 11th, 2010Grim.
Via: Guardian:
The old hands say there was never much glamour in piloting several tonnes of metal thousands of feet in the air.
But there’s no denying that to the earthbound back in the jet-set era half a century ago – when Pan Am’s “Clippers” ruled the air lanes and service was modelled on transatlantic ocean liners – pilots were regarded with an awe just short of that accorded to astronauts.
The exotic blend of international travel, the authority of commanding the ever larger and faster airliners, and those dashing uniforms turned heads, drew autograph hunters and attracted groupies. Pilots also made a lot of money.
Today it is different. Captain Dave Ryter earned so little when he was a co-pilot for a major airline that he lived in a gang area of Los Angeles, commuted for hours to work and made less money than a bus driver.
“I was standing at a gate waiting to commute a few years ago. I was in uniform and a passenger walks over to me and strikes up a conversation as people often do. He said: where’s your second home? I looked at him, thinking he was making a joke. He was serious. I said: actually, it’s my parents’,” said Ryter. “I was living in a very small town home in a gang area and my wife also worked for the two of us to support our family.”
Anyone waiting for their underpants to be checked knows that the glamour went out of flying years ago. But nowhere has the cachet fallen so far as in the US, where pilots on commuter airlines responsible for more than half the country’s flights now earn pitifully low salaries for long, unsocial hours.
Cachet
Many are forced to fly half way around the country before they even begin work. Others sleep in trailers at the back of Los Angeles airport, in airline lounges across the country or even on the floors of their own planes. Some co-pilots, who typically take home about $20,000 (£12,500) a year, hold down second jobs to make ends meet.
Unless they have come through the military, many pilots also start their first jobs deeply in debt. “Many of them come to these jobs with $150,000 of debt for a $15,000-$20,000 starting job,” said Ryter. “It’s hard to make the economics of that work out. But there’s a theory that one day they’ll make a lot more money than that. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But the problem is they are in, for a number of years, quite a hard haul and there’s certainly no glamour. That’s long since gone.”
The result is not only the diminishing of a once coveted profession but increasing concerns about safety as many pilots are worked to the very limits of regulations, leaving them exhausted as well as relatively poor.
I actually sat next to a pilot going from Auckland back to LAX and during our trip we had a very lengthy and enjoyable conversation about the airline industry etc. He also was doing National Guard duty in Iraq and told me quite a lot of things. But there was a line he repeated, from another pilot he knew who was, like this story, just barely getting by who said, “I’m not making any money but I’m LIVING THE DREAM”… All tongue in cheek but the point was the old days were long gone for the typical airline pilot looking to make those big bucks.