As a passenger, you might get on a plane with a senior crew. Your pilots have slept a full 8 hours every night for the last week and are fresh from spending a f

As a passenger, you might get on a plane with a senior crew. Your pilots have slept a full 8 hours every night for the last week and are fresh from spending a four-day weekend with their families. The captain has been with the airline for 20 years. The first officer has been flying this type of airplane for 10 years and could do the entire flight by him or herself if necessary. Alternatively, you might get onto a plane with a junior crew. Your pilots are exhausted from being on the last day of a four-day trip. Each night they've gotten a 9-11-hour "rest period", but that includes waiting for a shuttle to the hotel, riding the shuttle to and from the hotel, showering, eating, and possibly trying to sleep at an unusual hour. Perhaps they've slept 5 hours each night. The first officer joined the airline a few months ago. He or she has some simulator training, but is struggling to stay ahead, mentally, of the airplane. Get rid of the unions and every crew would be exhausted, underpaid, and undersupported. You can't trust corporate management. Source: centuries of observation. Pilot salaries aren't that expensive. A pilot logs about 40-45 flight hours per month (the guideline is 40, but that doesn't include takeoff and landing) for a total around 500 per year. Since length of flight and passenger count are correlated, and since we're talking about the highest-paid pilots, we can assume an average passenger count of 150. That's 75,000 passenger-hours per year. For a $300k pilot, we're talking $4 per passenger-hour. That's nothing, compared to the price of a ticket. The reason airlines are so brittle, and suffer when business cycles go against them, is that they have enormous fixed costs while being in a commodity business. Also, the bulk of their profit doesn't come from leisure travel but semi-discretionary business travel (hence the premium paid for airline tickets less than 14 days in advance, and for business class) and that goes away quickly in a downturn, now that videoconferencing is an option.