Editorial: Do the Right Thing

Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing,” Winston Churchill is said to have remarked before adding mischievously, “Once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” Sometime in the not-too-distant future, the US aviation community is going to have to do the right thing when it comes to fixing the process by which airline pilots are hired, trained and compensated. Because as Senior Editor Aaron Karp makes clear in our cover story beginning on p. 22, the present system is starting to fray. One sign is last year’s Colgan Air accident, a tragedy that has shined a spotlight on both pilot training/hiring practices and the mostly underappreciated position regional carries have assumed over the past decade. It is a role that also may be due for closer examination, as contributor Kathryn Creedy explains (p. 34).

At the root of the problem is the fact that the system is a relic of a bygone era in which airlines could rely on a steady stream of experienced, high-time ex-military aviators housed, fed, clothed and trained at taxpayer expense. For their part, pilots who completed their service obligations intact and had the desire and the persistence could look forward to a long and prosperous career as a pilot for a major carrier.

Over the past 10-15 years, that system has been stressed severely. The end of the Cold War and the ensuing military downsizing thinned the ranks of prospective airline pilots. The impact of this change has yet to be felt at the legacy carriers because few have needed to hire pilots, what with downsizing and the elimination of the Age 60 rule. But it is coming.

The dot.com bust and 9/11, meanwhile, began (or accelerated) the long process of financial restructuring that has led to pilots at most network airlines earning considerably less than they did in 2000. New jobs and opportunities to advance have shrunk as regional airlines have taken over much mainline flying.

Thus the conundrum: On the one hand, the flow of high-time ex-military pilots is now a trickle, while young people desirous of an airline flying career face the prospect of spending tens of thousands of dollars of their own money to acquire a license for a job whose prospects, quite frankly, are uncertain and significantly diminished. And instead of building their hours in the wild blue yonder, they are flying back and forth between say, Newark and Buffalo, earning much less than most big city bus drivers and with fewer benefits, in hopes of someday getting hired by a major carrier.

Added to this mix is concern in Congress and elsewhere that too many inexperienced pilots have been hired by the fast-growing regionals and that their training is inadequate, compromising safety. The solution, some say, is to increase dramatically the number of flight hours required of any pilot before he or she can sit in the right seat. We don’t know that this necessarily will make them better fliers—the Colgan captain had 3,300 hr.—but we do know it will greatly reduce the number of qualified candidates in the short term while making the pilot career choice that much more daunting because civilian candidates will have to pay for many more hours of flight time.

This may not come to pass, although both houses of Congress have approved legislation requiring airline pilot candidates to possess an Airline Transport Pilot certificate (minimum 1,500 hr. flight time). Regardless of the outcome of the debate, we believe that US major airlines need to consider an idea long viewed as anathema on these shores: That they have a role to play in funding and supporting ab initio training of their future line pilots. It is a practice already accepted in countries that lacked a wide military pipeline into civilian cockpits.

Now consider the other piece of the puzzle: The regional airlines. They operate a majority of domestic departures and are the only carriers at 75% of airports receiving commercial air service. But the passengers on those flights are not their true customers; these are the major airlines on whose behalf they operate the aircraft. And the airlines that have outsourced this flying want it performed at the lowest possible cost. It is FAA’s responsibility, they state, to insure that the cheapest bidder is not cutting corners on training and safety. Their view is consistent with the regulations as written. But being correct and being in the right are not always the same thing. And as airlines learned to their dismay with the tarmac delay rule, regulations and laws can be changed if enough people get angry.