...it works the same in the teaching profession. Change school districts, and you start at the bottom, or at best, no better than the salary of a five or six year veteran.

If you teach in public schools and want to move, you'd better do so early in your career.

Otherwise, it's back to $25,000 per year.

...either you can fly the plane or you cant. Seems unfair to shove others out of the way when they can do the job just as well.

The fact that the pilot senority system was not adapted to current reality is simply crazy. There *should* be a national seniority system, across all airlines. That's just commonsense, if, indeed, a compensation system based on seniority is the best way to go.

Completely arbitrary pay-cuts are common all across business, in good times and bad. I find management cuts pay whenever they think they can get away with it, period. Unlike those lucky buggers at AIG, who are apparently "needed" for some unknown reason, the rest of us are only as needed as management thinks we are...and management tends to think very few people are really "needed."

Is that inevitably airlines would not hire pilots with high seniority -- preferring to look for low and low-middle pilots so as to save on wages. The result is that a laid-off senior pilot would never get another job, or only if there were to be a big pilot-shortage.

...is to keep you off the dock". I really dig the version sung by the children's choir. But I digress.

ALPA and the other pilot unions are not serving you. Witness the ongoing battle between the East Coast and West Coast pilots as a result of the America West/US Airways merger. While the competing unions and members tear into each other over "the numbers", management can sit back and roll their fingers together muttering "excellent" like Mr. Burns.

The airline industry changed dramatically after deregulation but the unions are still stuck in the '60's business model. As a dues paying member, you should demand better representation.

It is all about the insanity of being in a highly, possibly the most highly, regulated profession. Doctors do not have to requalify at the same level and frequency.

But it also reminds me of the pink collar ghetto: the simple economic fact is that there are a whole lot of would be pilots out there, putting immense pressures on the economics of the profession, and keeping them in the salary basements.

What I don't understand is why there isn't a good free-market answer to it all: some company willing to vacuum up all the good experienced pilots at a better rate than starters but never willing to put them into the salary astrophere of the bygone PanAm pilot of yore? Where exactly do you stand on the whole seniority yielding major big bux thing? Most workers like bus drivers live in that world (and while much less sophisticated, I am daily amazed at their skill in pushing their big boxes through our insane traffic without death or injury.)

The comparison with bus-drivers is actually a good one: starting pilots make less than a starting city bus driver, but, avoiding lay-offs and furloughs, enjoy a much steeper salary gradient, and then whine about how they miss out on it mostly. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or super economist to figure this out.

If there were a national seniority list could you imagine the havoc it would cause? For example, let's say you've been at an airline for 10 years and are doing well and another carrier goes out of business. If this airline is senior, like Airways, all of their pilots would force you to the very bottom of your own seniority list. As a pilot for a major airline I chose the company I work for. If someone wanted to be an X Airline pilot they should have applied at and interviewed at X Airline. If there was a national seniority list created we would live our lives constatntly being worried about negative career movement, there is enough of that without pilots from other carriers helping push me further back. This goes both ways, I work hard so my company can succeed and I am rewarded for my work with compensation based on the number of years I have toiled for this company, why reward someone who worked for another carrier? Doesn't make sense to me.

when i was a kid. But my eyesight was not good enough, so I gave it up. Maybe that was a good thing.

Eventually I got my private pilots license, decades later.

Let me tell you, flying is a lot harder than driving, partly because you have to think in three dimensions. And there is a lot more multitasking going on, and much greater consequences for mistakes.

But yeah, my 16 month old now looks up and says "plane" whenever he hears a plane going over. I gotta get him into finance.

I used to think that all airline pilots were very well paid. Over time, I've figured out that that's true only for a minority of pilots. And they get that pay just because they were very lucky. Even the average pay is low because there is a very large number of pilots at the low end of the very long pay range. In fact, most of the time if we knew how little the pilot of our plane was being paid, our chins would drop. Frankly, I think it something of a miracle that more crashes aren't charged to "pilot error" because all the good pilots have moved on to professions where the pay is better.

Thanks, Patrick, for this one.

It brings to mind a 1962 VMI Brother Rat of mine I also went to high school with. He flew 707 tankers refueling bombers in the mid 60's. Later he flew with Continental before being laid off, after which he flew for "Miscellaneous Airlines" for many years, like an itinerant worker.

Eventually he got a job as a Captain with Kuwait Airlines after the first Gulf War, and ended his flying days with Kuwait on a run from Bangkok to Manila. I told him it was easy; due east to Manila, and then reverse course to Bangkok.

He was involuntarily retired at age 60. A few years later, not long after his wife's death, he blew his brains out when he was faced with foreclosure on his north Dallas condo owing to the loss of her income.

Is this really how we want to treat the people we entrust our lives to in the skies everyday?

Dan Prall