Jetwhine

Aviation buzz and bold opinion

Rob Mark

Why is Regional Airline Pay So Bad?

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Jetwhine
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Why is Regional Airline Pay So Bad?
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Why is Regional Airline Pay So Bad?

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to The Aviation Minute podcast or just read the text of the show below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well.

I was thinking the other day about my early days as a working flight instructor. I remember hanging out with a bunch of other instructors at Palwaukee airport grousing about how we’d live on the 5 bucks an hour we could get paid for sitting in the right seat of a Cessna 150. Then one day we heard about this guy on the airport who was willing to instruct for free … zero, zip, nada … just because he loved flying so much. He had another job so he didn’t really care about the money. I can tell you … the rest of us instructors didn’t much like this idea of a competitor undercutting our prices.

q400.jpgThere was a lesson about pilot wages that I took from this experience after one of the other guys told me not to worry about that instructor. “Hey,” he told me. “The guy may get a few students, but don’t you think they’ll be paying him what both his students AND that instructor believe he’s worth?”

Hmmmm. I never forgot that.

So on to today’s topic … the lousy pay at the regional airlines. Why does it continue, many people wonder?

First a bit of context. Most of the regional airlines provide service to more than one major airline. Because there are only a few regional feeders to deliver service to the few majors we have left in this country, the business has become pretty cut-throat. That means those regionals will do most anything to keep costs low and that means … you guessed … keep wages low.

So let’s compare Envoy, the old American Eagle carrier, with the mainline pilots at American Airlines just to see how different the groups are.

You may have heard recently the American mainline pilots — represented by the Allied Pilots Association — just signed a new contract, one that gives them an immediate 23% pay hike and 3% annual raises after that. Not bad, but then American Airlines pulled down some serious profits the past few years including a windfall off the drop in fuel prices. [Read more…] about Why is Regional Airline Pay So Bad?

Drones in the News

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Drones in the News

When I was a kid my mom told me she could always tell when I was hiding something … “It shows all over your face,” she’d say.

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No one, not even me, believes drones this size are a threat.

So what does this have to do with the recent uptick in news coverage of drones, UAS, UAVs, RPVs and the rest? I sat in on a CNBC session last week with a professor from Duke University who I thought had been drinking a bit too much of the drone Kool-Aid. I tried to hide my shock at some of her responses, especially since she herself is a pilot, but I don’t think I did a very good job.

While I was trying to explain my support for these critters – ah, the drones, not Duke University professors – she took off for left field explaining that a drone and an Airbus are the same thing. And in a way, they are both fly-by-wire … “except that an Airbus has two pilots on board to look out the windows for drones.” [Read more…] about Drones in the News

The Aviation Minute: Child Restraints on Airplanes

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The Aviation Minute: Child Restraints on Airplanes
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TAM Final LogoRGBWhen my wife and I were married a long time ago, we promised ourselves that if we ever had kids and wanted to travel on an airplane, we’d just fork over the extra money for a ticket. To us, the risk of injury should they fly out of our hands during an accident or in turbulence simply wasn’t worth the few hundred dollars we’d save.

Years later when we decided to take our then infant daughter on an American Airlines flight to LAX, we learned most of the flight attendants didn’t know much about car seats on airplanes.

Today, there is still nothing that requires a parent to put any kind of restraint on a child under two years of age. They’re still permitted to ride on their parent’s lap even though there’s no way a parent could hold them down in a crash. The 1989 crash of United 232 proved that.

So why do we permit kids to ride around in an airplane without a seatbelt when we’ve had laws for decades that prevent the same thing in a car? Here’s what I learned.

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Subscribe to The Aviation Minute on iTunes

Rob Mark, Publisher

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The Aviation Minute Continues: Episodes Four & Five

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The Aviation Minute Continues: Episodes Four & Five
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It’s time to get our listeners caught up on The Aviation Minute.

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Seems that working the kinks out of our new podcast turned out to be a bit more time consuming than I’d at first thought. Now that the iTunes folks tell us The Aviation Minute has been added to to the approved list of shows, it seemed like just the right moment to bring people up to speed on episodes four and five. From this week forward, you can also expect a new episode of The Aviation Minute each and every Thursday.

Episode four speaks to women in aviation and why the percentage of ladies in this industry remains so dismally tiny, while episode five offers a few parting thoughts to outgoing NTSB Chairman Deb Hersman and her respected team of investigative personnel.

Subscribing to the Aviation Minute

Because a show’s value increases with the number of listeners, I wanted to be sure you knew the easy ways to follow us. Certainly people using smart phones might find following The Aviation Minute easier through iTunes, but there is another system word mentioning … RSS. Despite the meaning — Really Simple Syndication — my first attempts at hooking up through RSS were a dismal failure. It took me awhile to learn that you need a reader of some sort to act as the aggregator for your feeds … so much for the simple part … no one mentioned that.feedly

Google’s Feedly app has become my aggregator of choice, so much so that I’ve turned it into my default browser page. Now when I log on each morning, I can tell at a glance which of my favorite sites have created fresh content without the need to remember to continually check back at a dozens locations

So enjoy episodes four and five of The Aviation Minute … and of course be sure and tell your friends if you think the content’s worth 90 seconds of their time every week.

Thanks,

Rob Mark, Publisher

PS — Is there an issue in the aviation world that’s driving you crazy? Tell us about it and maybe we’ll use it for an upcoming episode. E-mail me directly at rob@jetwhine.com. And don’t forget to tell us the country you’re listening in from.

Understanding Air France 447’s Author Bill Palmer Talks to Jetwhine

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Understanding Air France 447's Author Bill Palmer Talks to Jetwhine
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collagecover3Regular Jetwhine readers might just remember a number of lively debates on this blog about what happened to Air France 447 over the South Atlantic in June 2009. A few of those conversations reached heated proportions too, with opinions … some from pilots, some not. One commentor here at Jetwhine always managed to sound informed yet cool through all the chatter. That man was Bill Palmer, an Airbus A330 captain and instructor pilot for one of the major airlines. 

We spent some time recently talking to Palmer about his new book, “Understanding Air France 447,” a volume focused on helping readers better understand what really happened that night, as well as to help separate the facts from the rumors and innuendos. One rumor claimed the tail fell of the A330 — false. Another that the “Stall, Stall,” audio warning message played in the cockpit for nearly a solid minute without anyone in the cockpit even mentioning the word stall — true.

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The book is chock full of detailed explanations about what happened on board the cockpit of this A330 that stormy June morning, as well as the inner workings of the BEA investigation of the crash. This book offers valuable lessons for any pilot, whether they’re airline or corporate pilots, or Piper and Cessna drivers. You’ll find Palmer’s book in paperback and e-book formats at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com, as well in eBook form at the iTunes store.

Grab a cup of coffee and for the next 10 minutes or so listen to Bill Palmer explain what happened aboard Air France 447 in June 2009 and exactly what this crash means for the rest of the aviation industry.