Apparently you don’t earn a livable wage until you get about 10-12 years of seniority which allows you to bid more profitable long haul flights.
That’s means you may have to “work the pole” early in your career to make ends meet.
intercst
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why work that job ? Most of them are young and attractive. Be a sales rep for big pharma, lol, put those looks to work.
Like one said in the video, they could make more at Macs, so go work at Macs.
I guess the lore of flight attendant being “glamorous” is worth giving up some pay for. I’d walk away quickly from it, until airlines show they are going to double the pay, otherwise not worth it.
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Most airlines don’t pay their attendants until the cabin doors close. Which is a total screw job because they have to be there in uniform to get everyone seated and squared away, shoving bags up in the bins, serving drinks in first class, etc. and they don’t get a dime for it.
Being a flight attendant has never paid that well. It has great benefits though.
Pilots also don’t get paid until the wheels leave the runway on take-off. That’s just how the industry works.
There was a guy at the local airport who was a senior First Officer who only flew a Portland to Tokyo flight once a week. So he was only working 3 days a week. Next promotion would stand-by B737 Captain on short-haul routes where you’d be working 7-days/week to make the same money. But I guess there are enough people who want to be Captains to fill those flights and work the hours.
intercst
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Apparently not. The aviation museum near my home hosted a meeting of some state aviation authority. Their big topic of discussion was the pilot shortage, and how could the government subsidize pilot training.
Steve
Put the stewardesses into pilot training at company expense–plus ongoing fees to the govt, of course. Then put all the C-class wannabees to work as stewardesses. They can “work their way up”.
no, No, NO! “Must not burden…”
Some of the airlines are paying now. Whatsa Matta U’s aviation program has grown tremendously over the last 20 or 30 years. Not on the state’s dime. The state wouldn’t pay for it. The aviation school is heavily sponsored by Delta, United, and SkyWest.
The Aviation program had a small facility at Kalamazoo’s airport. (WMU is in Kazoo). But Kalamazoo wouldn’t lift a finger to help Western expand in Kazoo, so the aviation program moved to Battle Creek. The program took over the disused passenger terminal in BC, and added a $20M expansion.
I should crawl into my WMU Aviation T-shirt and wander over there for a look-see some day.
They are not being “burdened”. That is impossible. They are doing what they said they would do: Find, train, and hire more pilots. Of course, they do not have to find, train, and hire more pilots. They could choose to go out of business instead. Their choice…
The training hurts profits. It would be much more popular with the airlines if the training was all done at government expense. Used to be the USAF and USN trained a vast number of pilots, who then switched to the reserve, or resigned their commissions, after a few years, and were available to the airlines.
Here is a graph of what the USAF spends training a pilot.
It hurts the CEO’s personal plan to maximize HIS income stream. Everyone/everything else be damned.
Declining number of serving USAF pilots. Service pilots are aggressively recruited by airlines, because it is cheaper, for the airlines, to offer the pilots an eye-popping amount of money, than to spend the Millions the government does, to train them.
Hence the universal cry “the gummit gotta do it for me”.
Steve
Those numbers for training military pilots differ, in large part, from training a commercial pilot due to needing to train them how to do other tasks at the same time…such as shooting weapons, avoiding shots being fired, ejecting and surviving, etc.
Mike
Read down the list almost $2.5M to train a Herc driver to haul freight. Can’t help but wonder why it is so much cheaper to train a C-17 driver than a Herc driver. Either way you slice it, it is cheaper for the “JC” to recruit a military pilot with a $100,000 signing bonus, than to pay for all the training, for a non-pilot or 172 driver, for multi-engine airliners.
Steve
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