Since I started working for my airline, my wife and I have REALLY used my flight benefits. We have flown to:

Washington, D.C – our favorite!

Portland, Oregon

Chicago, Illinois

Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

Toronto, Canada

Atlanta, Georgia

St. Louis, Missouri

Houston, Texas

Las Vegas, Nevada

Los Angeles, California

San Francisco, California

Phoenix, Arizona

Denver, Colorado

Dallas, Texas

Santa Ana, California

Sacramento, California

New York, New York

Boston, Massachusetts

Orlando, Florida

New Orleans, Louisiana

Tokyo, Japan

I am sure there is more….too bad we couldn’t get airline miles!

Besides my family, I get a few “buddy passes” to share with friends and extended family.

At my airline there is an order to who gets on a plane:

1 – Deadheading crewmembers needed for a flight at the next destination

2 – Paying passengers

3 – Deadheading crewmembers non needed for a flight (deadheading home)

4 – Revenue Passengers standing by

5 – Employee standby passengers

6 – “Buddy Pass” guest

7 – ZED fare guest

8 – Offline (other airline) jumpseaters

It’s actually more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it.

A friend of mine wanted to visit a friend in Phoenix for the weekend. She wanted to leave Saturday and return Monday. The morning flights to PHX looked great all last week. Even the night before the first two flights of the day were less than 1/2 full. She was going on the second flight leaving at 8:30AM.

Saturday morning I had airport standby. I checked up on the flights and noticed something bad happened to the first flight. None of the 30+ non-rev’s got on! Further investigation showed the flight cancelled due to a mechanical problem. Rut row!

I met my friend at the gate. She was standing in line thinking she would get a seat. This wasn’t her first time to use a buddy pass and in her mind the plane was nearly empty. I approached and asked if she brought a book. She had two…which was a good thing because it was going to be a long day.

There was a flight to PHX almost every hour. Things were looking 1/2 way good at first, but more and more revenue standby passengers and employee non-revs were being added to the standby list. Each standby pushed my friend down. At one point she was number 60 for standby!

I finished my standby shift at 2PM and went home. She stuck it out but finally tossed in the towel at 4PM. Turns out if she had waited she would have gotten a seat on the last flight of the night at 9:30PM. Not really worth it.

Her husband picked her up and my wife and I met them for dinner. I let her know that the first flight out Sunday morning had over 100 empty seats and that, as long as the plane fired up, she should be good to go.

Sunday morning I was happy to see that, not only did she get a seat, but she gas a seat in First Class.

She is coming back today on the last flight out of PHX. As of now the plane is 1/2 full.

Buddy passes can be very useful for friends with flexible travel plans and patience. I am held responsible for the actions of all who use my buddy passes. Employees have lost their personal travel benefits (for a short time or permanently!) for the actions of guest on buddy passes. I only offered them to a small group of family and friends. Only a handful have taken me up on them. Planes are fairly full these days and most people can’t wait till the last minute to plan a trip. For those that can, buddy passes are a very economical way to travel.

You read through the book and start to question things. “Is it really necessary to have such explicit work rules ? Can things really get to the point where I have to reference this book?”

Years go by and your pay and quality of life go up. A kid or two is born and your life is budgeted around your pay at your dream job. Life is good.

Management begins to blatantly violate the contract. The Union is filing grievances almost daily against management. A new contract negotiation period is rapidly approaching. Negotiations start as expected: Management wants more work with the same or less pay, the Union wants the work dictated in the contract with the same or, more likely, better pay.

Negotiations stall. The contract expires. You’re not sure, but it looks like Management is using the old contract to keep the furnace in their ivory towers warm. Your dream job isn’t so dreamy anymore.

Now in most professions you could leave with your experience….say 8 years…and go to a new job in the same industry and start out with the pay equal to your experience. An accountant with 8 years experience can get a new gig and get 8 year pay. Not so with the airlines.

Over the last month or so I’ve had friends ask why flight crews strike? Why not just go to a new airline? Well it’s because they would have to start all over again. Flight crews would have to start back over at year one pay and year one seniority. I believe this is true for all non-management airline positions. Airline CEO’s and Analyst of course have golden parachutes that allow them to leave Air Express and go over to Steel Air and get the same…or better pay.

Employees at major airlines have been there for 20+ years. Starting over isn’t an option. They have to fight for their jobs.

True we all know this going into it, but it doesn’t make it right.

The following regionals fly for Continental:

Expressjet (the largest)

Colgan

Gulfstream International

CommutAir

Cape Air

The following regionals fly for United:

Skywest (the largest)

Expressjet

ASA

Republic

GoJet

Mesa

Trans-States

Colgan

That’s a lot of regionals. United has far more regionals than Continental. Once they merge there could be a shake down and whipshawing. I also suspect bases/domiciles to be closed/adjusted (up or down). When Delta and Northwest merged regionals were moved around quite a bit. Continental and United don’t have major bases close to each other…well Cleveland and Chicago. Hmmm…it will be interesting.

Battery life has been very good. It helps that I fly a fairly quiet plane. I get about 50 hours of use with name brand batteries.

I’ve gotten used to having the FAA TSO required headphones under the Bose QC2. The Captain’s I fly with all give me a double take thinking I have a MP3 player and my headset. Once I explain it they either get it or think it’s too much trouble.

Once I’m up at cruise I take off the headphones and use just the QC2s. My company manual only requires headphones and booms mikes below FL180.

Another perk is being able to change out the microphone for the stock cable during deadheads and enjoying regular music.

Would I buy it again? Yes. The Telex 500 ANR can be had for about $450-$510. A Bose + UflyMike setup cost a little over $600. Being able to use AA batteries is a huge plus in my book.

Bose doesn’t sell QC2′s anymore. The QC15′s I also own sounded a little off when I first used them. Could have been my headset, not sure. UFlyMike has great support and mentioned no issues when using the QC15s. For those who require a TSO’d headset, to my knowledge the QC15 isn’t TSO’d yet.

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A US Airways Express regional jet carrying 30 passengers and three crew members aborted its takeoff at Charleston’s Yeager Airport on Tuesday, rolled onto an overrun area at the end of the main runway, and came to a stop in a specially designed safety zone about 100 feet from the edge of the hilltop airport.

No one was injured in the incident, which took place shortly before 4:30 p.m. The airport remained closed until the 50-passenger Bombardier CRJ200 regional jet, which was bound for Charlotte, N.C., could be removed from the safety zone.

The safety zone contains a runway-wide Engineered Material Arresting System (EMAS), comprised of concrete blocks designed to collapse under the weight of an airplane and bring it to a safe stop. It was installed in 2008 for $5 million as part of Yeager’s new runway extension project.

The jet’s wheels were buried in the EMAS material, with its fuselage coming to rest only a few feet above the specially engineered pavement.

A crane was brought in and used to remove the aircraft from the safety zone. The airport reopened shortly before 10 p.m.

“The EMAS system did exactly what it was supposed to do,” said Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper. “My understanding is that the US Airways plane rolled through about three-fourths of the EMAS at the Charleston end of the runway.

“If it hadn’t been for the EMAS, I’m convinced a catastrophic accident would have occurred.”

Passengers were taken off the plane and back into the terminal.

“It was a little scary, but everyone remained calm,” said Julia Shaffer of Valrico, Fla.

“We were going pretty fast down the runway and then all of a sudden we started to slow down and it started to get bumpy. Then we completely stopped,” said her 14-year-old son, Jonah. “I thought the tire had shredded or something.

“But when we stopped it seemed like the wing was a little lower to the ground than it should be,” he said. That was due to the plane sinking into the EMAS.

Colgan is hiring 150 First Officers and American Eagle is hiring 70 or so. Good luck to all those looking for a job.

I may not have been around for that long, but when I started with XXXX last year (and no I was not a 250 hour wonder, I was 2300, CFI<CFII<MEI) I was happily based in LAS for a few months and engaged to a great girl. I signed a lease for a 12 month apartment. After a few months LAS closed so I was forced to commute to IND. The commute was getting to tough so I had to cancel my lease (paid a 3 month penatly) and got a place right next to IND . A month later I was displaced to CMH, which now cause me a 1 hour commute through CMH when I was living walking distance to IND. A month later I was displaced to SFO. Half way through training then I was displaced to ORD and sent home. When I came back for training about a week in I was displaced to MCO. When I told my fiance this she ended up leaving me because she couldn’t deal with the airline life anymore and was not willing to move to Florida. Then about 3 days later after my fiance had left me I was told I was being furloughed. I was furloughed one week before I would have finished training and didn’t even get the XXX type. I was moved half way around the country for an entire year and had my fiance leave me over XXXX. I’d say some of us have sacrificed more then you realize just to fly an airplane for a living. I don’t think you really realize how many times the bottom 20 or so of us were displaced in just one years times.

I’m very lucky that I haven’t been displaced/furlough and have an amazingly understanding wife.

The old hands say there was never much glamour in piloting several tonnes of metal thousands of feet in the air.

But there’s no denying that to the earthbound back in the jet-set era half a century ago – when Pan Am’s “Clippers” ruled the air lanes and service was modelled on transatlantic ocean liners – pilots were regarded with an awe just short of that accorded to astronauts.

The exotic blend of international travel, the authority of commanding the ever larger and faster airliners, and those dashing uniforms turned heads, drew autograph hunters and attracted groupies. Pilots also made a lot of money.

Today it is different. Captain Dave Ryter earned so little when he was a co-pilot for a major airline that he lived in a gang area of Los Angeles, commuted for hours to work and made less money than a bus driver.

“I was standing at a gate waiting to commute a few years ago. I was in uniform and a passenger walks over to me and strikes up a conversation as people often do. He said: where’s your second home? I looked at him, thinking he was making a joke. He was serious. I said: actually, it’s my parents’,” said Ryter. “I was living in a very small town home in a gang area and my wife also worked for the two of us to support our family.”

Anyone waiting for their underpants to be checked knows that the glamour went out of flying years ago. But nowhere has the cachet fallen so far as in the US, where pilots on commuter airlines responsible for more than half the country’s flights now earn pitifully low salaries for long, unsocial hours.

Cachet

Many are forced to fly half way around the country before they even begin work. Others sleep in trailers at the back of Los Angeles airport, in airline lounges across the country or even on the floors of their own planes. Some co-pilots, who typically take home about $20,000 (£12,500) a year, hold down second jobs to make ends meet.

Unless they have come through the military, many pilots also start their first jobs deeply in debt. ”Many of them come to these jobs with $150,000 of debt for a $15,000-$20,000 starting job,” said Ryter. “It’s hard to make the economics of that work out. But there’s a theory that one day they’ll make a lot more money than that. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But the problem is they are in, for a number of years, quite a hard haul and there’s certainly no glamour. That’s long since gone.”

The result is not only the diminishing of a once coveted profession but increasing concerns about safety as many pilots are worked to the very limits of regulations, leaving them exhausted as well as relatively poor.

The largest union for pilots, the Air Line Pilots Association (Alpa), traces the change back about 20 years, when the smaller domestic airlines stopped selling their own tickets and began competing for contracts to act as local extensions of the major carriers. To win contracts they slashed costs, which included forcing down pay and demanding more of pilots.

Then came the 9/11 attacks, which pushed some airlines into bankruptcy and others to cut costs even further. Many pilots lost their jobs. Even those on some of the biggest airlines saw their pay slashed by as much as half.

But it is the regional pilots who have the toughest time. Ryter’s salary rose to $72,000 (£45,000) a year when he was promoted to captain three years ago, but many co-pilots have little prospect of promotion for years.

More than half of all regional pilots commute to work – which often means several hours in the jump seat of another aircraft before they begin their own job – largely because they are not paid enough to be able to afford to live in the major cities, such as New York or Miami, where their employers are based.

Ryter said that smaller airlines also regularly shifted where their aircraft and pilots are based according to the needs of the big carriers, but pilots were reluctant to uproot their families, pull children out of school and sell houses only to be moved again in a year.

“In the post-9/11 world, when companies have done everything they can to reduce costs, there have been changes that have really made the piloting job very challenging, very fatiguing, very demanding.

“With our schedules now it’s very common to leave one of the pilot domiciles and not see it for three or four days while you’re flying around the nation in multiple time zones. Without doubt the effect is that you are physically and mentally tired.

“The airlines have stayed right on the hairy edge of federal aviation regulations.”

The conditions in which commuter pilots now work were laid bare by an investigation into a crash near Buffalo, New York, that killed 50 people last year. It was revealed that neither the pilot, Marvin Renslow, nor co-pilot, Rebecca Shaw, had a proper night’s sleep before the flight.

Shaw, 24, was paid so little – just $16,200 (£10,000) a year – that she held a second job in a coffee shop and lived with her husband at her parents’ house across the country in Seattle. The night before the doomed flight, Shaw flew for several hours in the jump seat of two FedEx courier flights to reach her job at Newark airport and slept a few hours in the pilots’ lounge. Renslow also slept in the lounge after flying up to work from Florida, even though it was barred by the airline, Colgan Air, because of the regular disturbance from other pilots coming and going.

The investigation revealed that Shaw’s text messages just before the flight said she felt exhausted. Both pilots can be heard yawning on the voice recorder. During the flight, Shaw told Renslow that her husband, a soldier, was paid “more in one weekend of drill than I make [in a fortnight]“.

The co-pilot also reflected her relative inexperience by commenting that she had never seen so much ice on a plane, as it made its way through freezing weather. That was to prove an ominous observation. As the plane came in to land in bad weather at Buffalo the pilots did not notice their speed slow too much until an alarm sounded.

Renslow did the opposite to what he should have done and caused the plane to stall. Experts told the investigation that Renslow’s and Shaw’s evident lack of comprehension as to why the alarm was sounding suggested insufficient training.

One of the inquiry officials, Kitty Higgins, said she believed that the two pilots’ working conditions had contributed to the accident. ”When you put together the commuting patterns, the pay levels, the fact that the crew rooms aren’t supposed to be used [for sleeping] but are being used, I think it’s a recipe for an accident,” she said.

The head of the National Transportation Safety Board, Mark Rosenker, said that paying very low wages, knowing that it would result in pilots commuting long distances to get to work, was “winking and nodding” at safety.

Accident

Alpa’s vice-president, Captain Paul Rice, a 35-year airline veteran now flying transatlantic routes, says that the industry still remains extremely safe compared with other forms of travel. But he is concerned that it has driven out more experienced pilots while giving the legal minimum of training to new recruits to cut costs.

“If you constantly remove elements of training, and training that once took three weeks is down to one week, it’s easy to see how there’s less time to pass knowledge along, practise certain manoeuvres, things like that,” he said.

“The public needs to ask the question: is it worth it to always look at prices as the driving factor? Our managements and the investors in the airlines need to think about what is the cost of safety.”

Many of the more experienced pilots who lost jobs on major airlines got out of the industry because they faced working for entry-level wages if they shifted to smaller carriers.

“If you can go down the street and get a job at Home Depot or in real estate where wages are substantially higher than at a regional carrier, that’s probably where you’re gonna go,” said Ryter. “Our new entry pilots are right down at the food stamp wages. They can’t afford to start over at a regional carrier.”

Yet while the glamour may have gone, there remains a certain pull for pilots such as Ryter.

“It’s all I ever wanted to do. I know we’re talking about the negatives, of which there are many, but I still love what I do – being able to get into an aircraft that you could never afford to rent on your own, and be able to pilot it around the nation. I still love the business,” he said.

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