I am always amazed at the shockingly low pay of most commercial aviators, and even more at the nonsense they have to put up with. But the lack of common sense in the airlines has always started at the top. I used to get a kick out of how one could be on a plane that cost tens of millions and the stewards not have change for a twenty, having started with a "bank" of about twenty singles.

While pilots have it bad, the stewards are paid even less, yet they too, have hours computed chock to chock. Pay for anyone who gets involved in actually flying the plane and serving the clients is getting so atrocious that I wonder about their mental health.

Is it just being up in the air? I don't get it. Based on your articles, my father, who drove a NYC bus for 20 years, had a much better job. He certainly made more money, and didn't worry about layoffs and furloughs; he has an extremely nice pension; in 1990, when he retired, he was making over $60K/year. What is there to love?

I sometimes wonder how many professions there are which aren't, in some way, misrepresented by journalistic misuse of statistics. Physicians, at least in the UK, are certainly on that list - for similar reasons to airline pilots; although they have less to worry about in terms of job security. Journalists will tell you that it's unreasonable to expect them to put cumulative frequency diagrams, interquartile ranges, or similar measures of the distribution of a dataset into a report, on the grounds that they take up too much space and the public don't understand them.

However, there are datasets for which a average absent other data is substantively misleading. This is probably one of them. A classic example would be a radioactive half-life - that is an average decay time, but nobody would ever call it that. Sports pundits are forever telling the "public" that, apparently, doesn't understand these averages that they're misleading; or alternatively the "public" themselves are saying the same things to the pundits in phone-ins.

This is now a serious problem in reporting. It has got to the stage where many people - myself included - dismiss any statistical evidence given in a report in the general press on the grounds of the probable ignorance of the people who wrote it. It ill becomes those who would promulgate and explain information to pretend that they are familiar with things they don't understand.

The first step to learning is admitting your ignorance. But even that step is not open to one who's would-be teachers have yet to take it.

Back in the late-'70's, I was a journeyman avionics technician for the long-defunct Eastern. One sizzling hot Atlanta afternoon, after I had just spent a good period of time in the furnace-like wheel well of the 727, the roar of the APU deafening me despite the multiple hearing protection I was wearing, I ascended to the cockpit to check out my repair. Kneeling on the floor between the three sweater-clad aviators and drenched in my own sweat, I was trying to shake off the chills brought on by the deliciciously air conditioned cockpit, a good 40 degrees colder than my previous environment.

As I worked, the captain was expounding with great sorrow on how hard a pilot's life was... the hotel layovers, being away from home 4 or 5 nights a month, the hours spent sitting around, waiting... etc. I had to remove my ear muffs and ear plugs, those necessary tools of survival for anyone interested in preserving a modicum of hearing who lives on an airport ramp, to hear what he was saying, for it was not necessary for him to shout in the quiet, comfortable cockpit. And all this for only a little over $100,000/year, he said. At the time, I was pulling down a cool $8.80 an hour. I was quite confident I understood far more about how this metal tube these 3 guys guided around the sky worked than they did. Experience had proven that time and time again.

I could not resist telling the captain as I departed the cockpit, the repair completed: "Gee, captain... that almosts sounds like a sacrifice!" Then I pulled my hearing protection back on and returned to the living hell that is an airport ramp, one that I lived in for 8+ hours, 5+ days a week, praying that if I survived heat stroke, ice storms, hearing loss and the general dangers of working with machines, I would not get run over by the random, chaotic path of some ramp vehicle or blown off my feet by the carelessly aimed jet blast of some oppressed pilot, fed up with waiting, hurrying to the departure runway... For $8.80/hour.

Too young and foolish to realize how badly this sucked, I was the happiest I would ever be in a working environment.

One problem sitting in a pilot's seat... you can't see behind you. Every worker in the airline industry (and big industry in general) is in the same dismal boat... and then, as is now, pay and working conditions are inversely proportional.

What is the median salary for airline pilots? I've missed that. "Average" is like the old joke about being in a bar with Bill Gates -- suddenly the average guy in the bar is a millionaire, right? Who-hoo!

This is very different from, say, sports unions -- that being another example where stats are quoted without much context. Major League Baseball players, for example, have a staggering average salary, but the median salary in MLB is much lower. That's because a few stars get paid colossal money, while lots of okay-but-not-superhuman players fill out rosters for decent but comprehensible amounts of money.

Pilots, I'm pretty sure, do not sort out that way. The younger people are likely to be just about as competent as a veteran with thirty years behind her, aren't they? Is there a mammoth, dramatic divide between the commuter airline pilot and those senior "stars" in terms of ability? Experience does count for something, but it's not that big a difference maker. Or anyway it shouldn't be.

So, my reaction to this particular argument, which has been repeated in this space a couple of times, is always: Why, then, doesn't some airline which wishes to be more competitive junk the extremes of this bizarrely disproportionate seniority system? Why doesn't Northwest or whoever, as part of a bankruptcy period, move toward a more level salary system, offering younger pilots a reasonable living wage and shaving the extreme pay off at the top? A more moderate system could also perhaps provide younger people with the funds to keep up their certifications; people low on the totem pole are hard pressed to even pay for classes, right?

It'd be as if the baseball stars suddenly made half what they do, with the money going instead to keep the minor league system a little better funded all 'round. Minor league clubs would have better nutritional experts on staff and so on, and lesser players down there would earn a little more so they could develop their games rather than taking jobs at Home Depot to make do over the winter. Eventually a club taking this approach would benefit from the investment lower in the ranks by developing better players generally. The problem being: the skill set of star players is so rare that they can demand a ton and get it. Are senior pilots in that spot, though?

Is it the unions resisting more balance, I assume? Aren't younger pilots in any position of influence within their union(s)? Because they must have some numbers behind them. They're looking like a sort of starved low caste that needs to figure out how to work the union system, to me.