Imagine how much cheaper air travel would be if the airlines could finally succeed in busting the pilots union.
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Ryanair’s Newest Cost Cutting Idea: Remove Second Pilot
http://consumerist.com/2010/09.....ilots.html
This is the same airline that was trying to find a way to justify charging to use the bathroom and letting people stand to fly.
Worth reviewing Captain Sullenberger’s testimony to Congress.
http://aircrewbuzz.com/2009/02.....-told.html
I’m flying in a couple of weeks on Alaska: I’d gladly pay extra fees for the best available pilot.
Holy shit. That account is an ass-puckerer.
Save us money? It wouldn’t save us money, it would just send a bigger slice of the pie to upper management and shareholders (AKA people who do no work).
We might be getting to the point where travel by air will only be affordable for the super rich. Well, that should at least cut-down on pollution and crowded airports.
Maybe we’re just not meant to be able to fly from coast-to-coast in 6 hours.
…because if there’s one industry that without question always puts the interests of its customers first, it’s the airlines.
I certainly haven’t noticed any appreciable improvement in baggage handling with all those fees. I wonder if you can sue for lost bags now that you have to pay for them to be handled?
@4, And who have responsibility only to the quarterly figures which determine their bonuses. Nothing else matters.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
From the linked article: “…He was explaining this while he was fighting the controls and trying to fly the airplane. And he said that with the auto pilot on, the airplane had suddenly begun an uncommanded roll to the left. And it was about almost halfway to wings vertical before he realized that the auto pilot was not going to handle this, and snapped the auto pilot off….”
He also goes on to point out that since the rudder pedals and the nose wheel are linked, he had to manually disengage the nose wheel and guide it by a “tillar” by hand.
None of this may have been possible on an Airbus plane. It’s fly-by-wire and computer systems are designed to not accept inputs from the pilots which it believes to be outside the airplane’s flight parameters. The problem is, sometimes the computer thinks everything is fine, because nobody ever programmed this scenario into it’s software.
Boeing has always had a different philosophy – it believes the pilot should always be able to over-ride the computer and fly the plane manually.
Of course, you could have the situation like they just discovered in China. It seems that booming demand for qualified pilots has led to at least 200 commerical airplane pilots having acquired their jobs by virtue of significantly falsified resumes. One of those affected carriers recently had a crash with significant loss of life. Of course, nobody’s saying yet whether there was a cause-and-effect relationship, but we may know more as investigations into the crash continue.
@ above: “We might be getting to the point where travel by air will only be affordable for the super rich.”
Easy solution: Few, if any, rich people. Now some would say this implies no air travel. My response? The world can get by just fine without either of them.
# 1: Actually, there’s a lot of talk in the airline community pushing for pilotless aircraft entirely. Executives as so smitten with aircraft manufacture’s presentations of computerized flight that they have visions of commercial flights without any aircrew at all (“want a beverage or a meal? Visit our vending machines at the rear of the aircraft!”)
Fortunately, the near glacial speed of the airline regulation agencies is keeping this in check, for now. But a few carriers are pushing for some “test flights” in cargo-only aircraft on cross-pacific voyages. Of particular interest to them are the very long cross-Pacific routes (Sidney to L.A., etc.).
@12 That wet dream hopefully won’t progress to the point where one of ’em undershoots the LAX approach and plows into Century City.
As it is, in the same way that engineers and scientists of the last century have become the mechanics and carpenters of this one, airline pilots, who because of the needed skills and horrendous responsibility of their jobs commanded pretty good pay and a lot of prestige, are being reduced to a status on a par with bus drivers. One of the areas in southern California where real estate has been hit the hardest has been Manhattan Beach, where a lot of pilots who lived elsewhere kept condos as a pied-a-terre for when they had to lay over at LAX. Now there’s a section of the airport parking lot that’s been reserved for these same folks to keep second-hand SUV’s to sleep over in.
‘Imagine how much cheaper air travel would be if the airlines could finally succeed in busting the pilots union.’
Farts the man whose Mommy pays for his plane tickets for himself and his daughter to visit her; as well as being chronically unemployed and ranting about unions and workers….oh, the irony. :)
Dang, just found out I have to fly to Louisville at the end of the month, and spend all day in the air to make a 5:00 p.m. meeting which will probably last all evening. Then I have to fly back the next day. I may just skip the hotel and try to catch a red-eye back to Seattle, if I can find one.
Why the heck is United trying to direct me to a United Express flight from Denver to Louisville on a 28-seat puddle-jumper?
When greedy Republican businessmen finally succeed in busting all workers down to minimum wage, we’ll finally have true wage equality in this country, and they won’t even call it communism.
Considering that Ryan Air’s route system consists of a lot of short hops all over Europe, at least the pilot is in the air only two or three hours, at most. With takeoff, landing, and navigation changes over rather congested air routes, he’s kept pretty busy.
But can you imagine being the only pilot/crew on an airplane on a fifteen-hour cargo flight from Anchorage to Sydney????
Reminds me of the last week of summer when I was a teenage lifegaurd. The pool would be almost completely empty, so we would count the bricks on the wall – over and over again – to try to stay sane.
And what does it cost any business executive in the airline industry to attain his ‘credentials” short of tuition to University paid for by his/herents? Commercial airline pilots pay tens of thousands of dollars to acquire all the ratings and licenses to fly multi-eingine jet aircraft (unless they have gone the military aviation route)and by the time they are hired by a major carrier, they are probably still paying off the loans to get those licenses/”type” ratings/flight hours. After they managed to get hired, they then start at the very bottom of the pay scale (some airlines have A, B, And C scales) and work their way up in seniority and pay WITHOUT any flight incidents blocking their way in the process. Why don’t they send up space shuttles without pilots (I ask rhetorically)? I would not fly on an airline with non-union pilots as it has been proven by the number of fatal accidents with non-sked carriers who hire underqualified pilots and keep unions out of their operations that THERE IS A DAMN GOOD REASON FOR PILOT AND FLIGHT ATTENDANT UNIONS…AND THAT IS SAFETY!!!
Forgot to say that I agree with other commenters about the fact that reducing the pay of the pilots by breaking the unions will NOT result in passing off the ‘savings” (at the cost of safety and would be eaten up by one fatal accident) to the passengers. It would most certainly go to the upper management (who consider too much pay not enough!!!), board members,and stockholders. They pass on the price of fuel to the passengers supposedly yet never have they considered lowering their bloated salaries to help the airline from sinking or having the rank and file lose their retirement or drastically cut their pay. Why do you think many airlines, including Alaska, did away with their ground crews and turned to contracting the work out to private companies that pay minimum wage, no benefits, and make the workers temporary with minimal training? Who would like to have a mechanic working on a commercial jet who has only the most rudimentary training and no experience? Unions make sure that their members are trained, experienced, capable, and up-to-date in all the latest technology!
Pilots and aircraft mechanics are a couple of those areas in which the distinction between “union” and “professional association” gets rather blurry. You don’t see a whole lot of public discourse about “busting the American Medical Association”, and who’d want to think about such a thing whilst being wheeled into surgery? On the other hand, management of health insurers and HMO’s has definitely worked to compress pay for doctors and other skilled caregivers. Even Group Health tries to squeeze the most “productivity” from every doc on their staff (especially primary care physicians) via computerized charting and at least a half-hearted attempt at “diagnosis by the numbers”. The latter, in fact, is somewhat problematical. Someone with a mysterious illness can be shuttled between their primary care doc and several specialists, without anyone trying to put all the information together and make sense out of it. A building full of computers can still only crudely approximate what goes on inside a really good doctor’s head.