Airline Pilots and the Rest of Us

An airline pilot career has a few more thorns sticking out of it these days. Pay scales are down, duty days are longer, schedules stink and passengers are easily riled. But even with all that said, I still think it makes for a pretty incredible career.

The airline pilot profession has evolved since 9/11 with a few twists I still don’t understand though. Perhaps you do. 

Most airline pilots began their careers learning to fly in much smaller general aviation airplanes and sometimes business jets as charter and corporate pilots before they made it to American, or Continental or AirTran.

So to me, it would seem proper to give little airplanes – sorry, anything smaller than a 737 is little to most airline folks – their due.

Yesterday’s Washington Post ran a Letter to the Editor by former ALPA president Duane Woerth in which he made it clear that some ALPA pilots support the airline’s and the FAA’s perspective that business aviation airplanes are the root of the airline’s problems. 

“The most critical issues in the public debate on airline and airport delays are first, that most of these delays that frustrate consumers are airspace delays and not airport delays or even airline-caused delays,” Woerth said. “And second, the huge contribution to airspace congestion of corporate aircraft. Why is the effect of corporate aircraft on congestion so often disregarded?” Woerth also wonders.

In a way, this perspective from an airline pilot really isn’t a great shock to me. After all, their companies do own these people.

But what I do find difficult to swallow is how a bunch of union rowdies that many airline pilots are – and I actually mean that in a nice way – can sleep at night knowing that the people who run their airlines and their own union are shooting themselves and the future of this profession in the foot.

If it were not for general aviation airplanes, those airline pilot ladies and gents would never have learned to fly. And where are the people supposed to come from to replace the thousands of pilots who are retiring each year? 

In an era of everything being “all about money,” and “all about me,” many airline pilots seem have forgotten where they came from.

Hopefully some of you are going to figure out that if you can harangue your management for the money you think you deserve for your efforts and if some of you are tough enough to confront ALPA about a variety of their shortcomings, you might at least make the effort to think about leaving something valuable behind for those pilots still climbing the ladder.

I guarantee you everyone in the airline biz is going to sit up and take notice when the pilot shortage hits the majors like it has the regionals.

Tell ALPA and your airline it’s time to start treating  general and business aviation as if it were part of the solution to the airline’s problems rather than the cause of everything that’s wrong with that broken-down airline model you covet so much.  

Technorati tags: ALPA, pilots, airline management, business aviation, pilot shortage, regional airlines, general aviation, flight training, airline