4 ms·
> "But a senior pilot at United will have to restart as a junior pilot with Delta, all that "high cost of time, effort, and dollars necessary to procure the ski
by davidf18 9y ago
> "But a senior pilot at United will have to restart as a junior pilot with Delta, all that "high cost of time, effort, and dollars necessary to procure the skills" be damned."
That doesn't make any sense at all. That sounds like some sort of anti-trust issue that keeps airline costs low by making it impossible to "poach" highly qualified pilots from other carriers and raise wages.
- prostoalex 9y agoSeniority rules are written by unions, not airlines. From airline management point of view, they have a fixed liability (number of pilot man-hours) and a fixed resource (pool of money to pay for those man-hours). How that fixed resource is applied to the fixed liability is up to the union. To quote a letter to the editor in 2003 WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB105149633146672400 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB105149633146672400 "A 45-year-old captain who has been with an airline for 15 years cannot quit and go elsewhere, because doing so would mean starting all over at the bottom, earning $25,000 a year at a new airline and working every holiday. Imagine if a surgeon had to go back to being an intern every time he changed hospitals." It's exploitable somewhat by airline management (definitely takes the metaphor of golden handcuffs to the next level), but then the number of airlines is not fixed, with new start-ups coming on board every few years or so, so you'd think that at least someone would exploit these inefficiencies, if it made economic sense for them.