If you’re a first officer with a lot of seniority, you have a pretty sweet job working 2 days/week flying a 10 hour nonstop to some foreign capitol, then 10 hours back, and making $250-$300k/yr for the privilege. If you accept a promotion to captain, you’re at the short-end of the seniority list for captains flying a B737 on a domestic short-haul route, working 5 to 7 days/week with all the waiting around (pilots only get paid for the time their in the air) Maybe you’d get a $20k to $30k/year increase for all the extra waiting. Who would accept that? Certainly not a math major, or even someone who could do arithmetic.
No. It’s because the Airline Pilots Union has negotiated a sweet enough deal that many of their members are deciding that there’s not enough money in being a Captain, that’s it’s worth toiling for 10-15 years in the domestic airline trenches before you’ve regained enough seniority on the Captain’s side to begin flying long haul routes again.
I suspect you could solve this with more money, but that would impact excessive Executive Compensation.
I refused at least a half-dozen promotions during my blissfully short 17-year engineering career. It was typical for management to offer you a 10%-15% raise for a position that would require working 50-60 hrs/wk versus the 40 hours or less if you were competent at your job as an “individual contributor”. That’s why I always had my resume out there with the headhunters and cycled through 5 different Fortune 500 companies during the 1980’s before I finally called it quits in 1994. At least 90% of the time, you can do a lot better by switching jobs, rather than working a lot of uncompensated overtime on the expectation that you’ll be rewarded for it.
It’s one thing to work for oneself and another to work for someone else. My first seven years were working for someone else, American multinationals, but I was also working for myself, in some cases having a lot of fun and in others learning to be able to aspire to higher positions. I also had a couple of really crappy bosses that was no fun at all. During the next three decades I had business partners and customers. During the last three decades I have worked almost exclusively for myself, the toughest job of all, learning to invest in the market.
Progress means getting rid of bosses, getting rid of partners, getting rid of customers. That’s what I love about the stock market, No Gods No Masters!
{{ I’ve written before how we’re in a new era of young mainline pilots. You’re seeing captains at mainline carriers in their mid-20s. Perhaps even wilder, Delta has at least one Boeing 767 captainin his mid-20s, who was able to bid to this position within just months of starting at the airline. It’s pretty wild to go from briefly being a Boeing 717 first officer to being a Boeing 767 captain.