American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take the Holidays Off
npr.org
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Interesting that there is a maximum rate.
>In a post to its website, the union warned its members that because "management unilaterally created their solution in violation of the contract, neither APA nor the contract can guarantee the promised payment of the premium being offered."
Looks like the pilots trust AA less than I do when they promise vouchers.
In most tech companies they would maybe give you an extra pizza but certainly no extra pay.
Having worked in Germany and Switzerland, I can tell you how many hoops my employer had to jump through to make their software engineers eligible (!) to work on the weekend.
By law, only "essential" personnel can be required to work weekends. All exceptions have to be white-listed on a case-by-case basis.
In one case, I had to be present at a 8am meeting on a Monday, in a town 5 hours away. Since trains didn't run until 5am, my employer shelled out for 150% travel time on sunday. And they didn't grumble about it.
If fewer companies could get away with paying "an extra pizza", I have the feeling that a lot of "essential work over the holidays" suddenly becomes non-essential really quickly.
To be frank with all the enterprise "cost cutting" and "Remote Work" - I doubt there would be even pizza.
Here in Europe, depending on the country it would be extra pay or vacation days.
Or you could keep the mouth shut, get the pizza and not report the issue to the authorities.
This store had a gardening section was was open on weekends, and people working there got jealous and complained to the warehouse boss. This resulted in our double pay being no more, and we only got what amounted to pay for an extra 45m of pay, for a 4 hour shift according to the union agreement. Needless to say, none of us wanted to skip out on our weekend for essentially no benefit, and my boss had to hire extra people full time to cover what we could do uninterrupted during sundays, ultimately meaning greater cost overall.
Now what pissed us off, is that the people in the gardening section was hired to work on Sundays. They knew this was the job.
It varies more company to company than it does from US to European. Many of the companies I've worked for have nearly European-level vacation/PTO policies.
With the more unionized lines of work, usually pay is lower and the stakes and dangers are much higher. I mean for airline pilots, fatigue puts lives at risk.
Anyone that gets explored on the workplace, without reporting the case to the government authorities, does so because they fear to loose their job after reporting it, or are completely in sync with the current situation.
In countries like Germany, unions also have a seat on the company board.
Free-market AA could offer better incentives, but the union doesn't think that's fair.
The 150% maximum pay was also likely a negotiation point between the airline and the union when agreeing on a contract.
You seem to think that negotiations between an at will pilot and an airline are on equal ground, they are not. The pilot is very unlikely to get a better deal outside of collective bargaining. That is why people are willing to pay a due and give up some freedoms in order to use them as leverage in compensation negotiations.
I am not ant-union but unless they live/work? in a "right to work" state I don't think they gave a choice but to pay dues or quit.
Of all union members in the country, only 7% actually have ever cast a vote in favor of the union that represents them.
The vast majority never have the opportunity to vote one way or the other, because once a union is formed, it is legally granted authority in perpetuity. They only lose that right if a majority for decertification or deauthorization, but for a number of legal reasons, it's almost impossible for those elections to even be held, even in cases when the majority of workers oppose union representation.
So, to answer your question, "But where does the union come from?" - most likely, from the people who happened to work there years ago, when 50% (plus one) voted in favor of it. It may or may not actually represent the wishes of the current workforce, were an election to be held today.
100% of people who accepted a job accepted the job...
'Plenty of prisons,' said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
'And the Union workhouses.' demanded Scrooge. 'Are they still in operation?'
Once I walked away from a contract where they refused to remove the 1-year non-compete.
Another time I worked for a for a startup which had started out as an open source/volunteer project. After a big disagreement about the contract with the lawyer, the principal investor told me to 'sign the contract I wanted.' I refused to write my own contract and insisted the lawyer stop being insane and send me a contract without the non-compete section. She never did, but I started getting paid.
It worked out. The startup failed, I gutted the two commits that weren't mine and back-ported all the changes to the OSS version, keeping it all GPLv3.
TL;DR I accepted a job without accepting a job contract.
The pilots would most definitely get a better deal outside of the collective bargaining. That is, all the ones that get left out because of this contract receive no benefits at all.
[1] http://www.bankableinsight.com/ways-unions-hurt-the-economy....
[2] http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/03/17/unions-harmful-wor...
If uber drivers unionized and made uber pay them more, then less capital would go to uber and eventually have less workers. Ultimately the return on capital will end up being the same, because capital looks for returns and will move. So in effect, it would only increase wages of drivers as long as it can prevent other drivers from showing up.
For anyone at home that wants to listen to someone that knows more about economy than any of us:
Unions exist to collectively bargain on behalf of workers in markets in which individual workers do not have sufficient bargaining power to achieve the same results. They remain in power in those markets precisely due to their continuing ability to achieve better-than-free-market rates for their members, as evidenced by the death/diminishment of unions in many fields where they are not able to maintain above-market compensation for their members.
They remain in power in those markets due to their legally-granted right to remain in power in perpetuity without periodic recertification or reauthorization elections.
That's not an opinion; that's legal fact, just like saying that the President of the United States is in power because the law grants him that right until January 2021. Unlike government, where politicans have to run for re-election every N years, once a union forms, there is no legal obligation to hold an election to keep them in power. (The process for petitioning for a decertification election is incredibly difficult, and unions are actually granted a great deal of leeway by the law in taking action to prevent these elections from happening. Furthermore, even in cases where they do happen, and the majority votes to decertify the union, the election results may be overturned by the NLRB.)
All in all, if you want to argue the case that unions successfully bargain for better results on behalf of workers, you can't really rely on the fact that they remain in power, because that's already the default - it takes an extraordinary degree of opposition to remove them.
Americans seems to favour "free market" at almost any cost, but you mention that Unions are not free market (for labor) yet they provide better results. So why the "free market" passion?
If you think of labor as a commodity, unions are simply a monopoly of labor. Everyone wants a monopoly of what they sell, and freedom of what they buy, this is no different.
I would be very hard pressed to find a good union case that didnt provoke some sort of restriction on other workes, either by wage fixing, protectionism or supply limiting.
Why do you think that it's mathematically impossible for a company to find the money some other way? Any profitable company by definition makes more money than it spends, so it's clearly possible for such a company to pay its workers more without having to reduce costs (i.e. hire fewer workers) or go into debt.
Depends on the industry. If there's a lot of foreign competition and workers aren't mindful of the health of the industry, they can easily kill it off. That's what happened to steel production in the US.
*Some of the steel production in the US. I am certainly not making the argument that the steel industry in the US is as large or vibrant as the 70s or 80s. However, USX still does have several plants open and is doing fairly well. In my slightly knowledgeable opinion, this is because there is such a high up front cost of building a plant (especially a continuous pour caster).
The industry also made a very large shift from producing new steel to recycling scrap to produce slabs. Virgin steel is much harder to work with and produce than its recycled counterpart. This lowers the barrier to entry, increasing competition.
After this shift, I don't think there is any way that the U.S would have been able to compete with Chinese steel regardless of unions. Even if you removed all of the union CBA stuff and just left U.S compensation laws and OSHA, I highly doubt the margins are there to compete in regards to recycled steel.
You cant reduce a compnies profits and think that will increase employment.
Why not? Google could make half the profit, pay it workers more and still make a boatload of money.
It's not like Google or Apple pay dividends.
Google is currently handing out giant sacks with dollar signs on them to machine learning people far exceeding the meager means of most other companies, and the stock price is rising.
By your logic, shouldn't they be in the crapper for over-compensating these folks compared to what the market value?
Doesn't work for Uber, because if half the drivers go on strike, pay will go up for the other half and more people are likely to work for Uber because the bar for entry is so low. Also no, uber would just raise prices. I'm fairly sure it was unions that made it difficult for just anyone to become a taxi driver though - protecting their own income, limiting competition etc.
For example, in argentina its impossible to hire pilots from other countries.
A free market does exist at some companies for pilots, and they are compensated and treated far less well than their unionized counterparts.
Because of the specialized training, pilots have lots of leverage. You can't quickly and easily replace them.
It’s pretty easy to replace pilots. Entry level pilots make less than a fast food manager.
What did they do?
What I'm trying to say is, older pilots screwing over younger pilots and would-be pilots is pretty common.
The answer is to look at who controls the pilot's union: very senior pilots. The airline management is mostly interested in what percentage of its revenues are paid out to pilots; the distribution of the money among the pilots does not affect profitability. The very senior pilots on the other side of the table say 'We need the most senior pilots to get $300,000 in pay and benefits.' The airline's response is 'The only way that could work is if we pay the new pilots $16,000 per year.' The group of senior pilots responds 'We can live with that.'"[0]
Baseless/Unsubstantiated comment. Unions come in when the people who are working there feel they aren't being treated fairly. Sure Free-market AA could offer better incentives to SOME, but at the detriment to MOST.
Argentina is a model example of what happens when the pilots have a strong union: they have the highest pilot salary in south america and there are consistent service outages due to strikes on holidays.
Fear not that if union workers could collect a paycheck without showing up to work and no consequence, you would not see any working.
Fixed that for you.
Sounds like a pretty good benefit for everyone involved.
> there are consistent service outages due to strikes on holidays.
Sucks for consumers, but your point was about the workers, not about consumers, etc.
Yes, its just a terrible one for everyone else. Thats the whole point.
> Sucks for consumers, but your point was about the workers, not about consumers, etc.
Consumers are workers. If we talk only about pilots, its also bad: the union prevents other pilots from being hired.
This is circular logic, isn't it? It's like saying McDonald's should only pay workers $3 an hour because I, some uninvolved person who happens to be a worker elsewhere, would like a cheaper hamburger. That's not pro-worker, that's pro-hamburger.
If the question is about a fair playing field between bosses and workers, I don't understand what a strike inconveniencing people has to do with it.
The artificial increase of wages has the same effect that the artificual increase of profits
You can look to the TSA or the NYPD for examples of this happening in the US.
There are TSA employees who have patterns of repeatedly showing up to work drunk, sleeping on the job, or stealing from passengers' bags and have managed to keep their jobs, because
And let's not forget three years ago, when the NYPD openly refused to do their job for three weeks[0], but still got paid all the same[1].
[0] I'm not complaining that the NYPD stopped enforcing low-level drug offenses that shouldn't even be crimes in the first place, but they literally collected paychecks while openly refusing to do it.
[1] https://nypost.com/2014/12/29/arrests-plummet-following-exec...
It could mean that unions or some forms of unions (state-backing etc) are incompatible with certain cultures though.
The unions in america and Argentina are more similar to italian and spanish unions which are rent seeking and confrontational. In argentina, unions have constitutional level protection, and union leaders have pseudo diplo powers( they are harder to arrest for ex). The result is very rich union leaders and all industries where unions exist have terrible employment and costs
But please. Do go on about how unions harm most workers.
If you'd like to continue making blanket statements about unions being harmful to "most" workers, I'll be happy to give you citations of what life in the mines was like before the unions.
Im from a country where almost half the employment is under the table, and the rest is unionized. Teachers, truckers and state workers enjoy plenty of perks and would defend like you are the role of unions. They should if they simply respond to their own incentives.
The result? Logistic cost is 50% the cost of food, education tripled staff and got worse results in the last decade and state spending is 50% of gdp.
The teacher can reminisce of how sad it would be for the kids if she didnt have such benefits or were fired and would ask you a name of who is being punished by her benefits. And you couldn't answer with a persons name like the teacher could. But its still very real.
The result is much cheaper airfares and no loss in quality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Australian_pilots%27_disp...
Correlation is not causation and all that fuzz.
Also, that piece of propaganda conveniently forgets that Avianca just suffered the longest ever strike in Colombia, not really the most worker or union friendly place.
I get the point. Pilots however, are super interchangeable, like software engineers. There's no reason peruvian, brasilian, paraguayan , brazilian and chilean pilots wouldnt move to argentina to work and depress wages. Except the biggest payer and employer of pilots in argentina is the State. And it doesnt hire that many foreigners, for some reason...
> Also, that piece of propaganda conveniently forgets that Avianca just suffered the longest ever strike in Colombia, not really the most worker or union friendly place.
I dont know what colombia has to do with argentinian pilots.
Of course, that would never work if they had made an error in their purchase of jet fuel futures -- the futures market does not have a do-over function.
The union is forcing the company to be professional in its dealings with employees, in the same way that it is professional in its dealings with vendors, regulators, bankers, customers -- pretty much every other stakeholder.
Case in point: several years ago when I was an SA we were having some sort of big piece of Verizon equipment in our office due to our bandwidth and phone demands. The guy was coming from Philly (to upstate ny) and was on his 10th consecutive day, on a Sunday, on a holiday weekend at like 3 AM and a forced double shift. I think he said he was on something like 10x overtime.
Even paying that kind of ridiculous OT was preferred by them vs hiring more CWA guys. CWA is/was a stronger union that would strike over that kind of cap.
free markets precisely allow participants to join together (e.g., unionize) to strike better deals in the marketplace (in fact, that was one of the original advantages of forming a company, to band people together to gain market power).
You had a choice. It just wasn't a fair one.
Being more serious for a minute, can you explain why you think like that? With data, not anecdotes.
I'd gladly trade an occasional 1.5x hourly bonus for a 2.5x salary.
Edit: BLS says average pilot salary is 126k[2] and majority are employed by airlines. [1] You're wrong.
1: http://work.chron.com/average-commercial-airline-pilots-sala... 2: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/a...
http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2016/03/09/airline-pi...
"Pilots at US carriers can work up to 100 hours per month and up to 1,000 hours per year, though in practice most pilots are going to fly closer to 900 hours per year.
For example, a 12th year captain on the 777, 787, or A330, is making $293 per hour. At 900 hours per year, that’s ~$264,000 per year. That doesn’t include things like their flight benefits and per diem pay (~$2.80 for every hour they’re gone on an international trip)."
I can see this devolving though. They're really apples and oranges industries; there are too many differences for a straight comparison.
The big variable is profit sharing which I know to have been 17% of annual gross in 2016 at one airline.
Multiply the rate by 1,100 for a ballpark annual salary. This doesn’t include per diem or benefits, which can be quite good. Delta, for example, puts a 16 percent match, based on total salary, into the pilot’s retirement account with no contribution from them.
lol good one
For example, during the first six months, my employer or I could end it with a month's notice, without having to give a reason. Now that we're past that, I have to give three months' notice, and they have to be cutting headcount in Germany, unless I'm fired for cause, which absent actual criminal activity, requires proof that they tried to work with me over a long period of time to correct whatever they were unhappy about with my performance. That part is a very mixed blessing. On the one hand, I feel braver about trying things I think will be good for my company and pushing for what I think will work best. On the other, it's very hard to get rid of people who have lost interest in their work.
Back to the hours vs. salary: many of us, especially at big, traditional companies, have contracts for a certain number of hours per week, usually 40, sometimes 35. Anything you work over that goes into your comp time account, anything below that is a debit on your comp time account. At my company, if I work outside the standard hours it a) requires agreement from the works council and b) gets paid at 2x time, with the overage paid out in my next paycheck.
Depending on your contract, your comp time account might not be allowed to go above or below certain values. When it goes above, either your manager has to make you stay away, or the overage gets paid out at what your hourly rate would have been.
Only people who are truly making manager money are outside this hours system. I used to balk at being sent home by 8pm or 10 working hours, but now I treasure it.
It's also why one of the first career mentorship steps I go through with Juniors is calculating their hourly rate with the assumption of 40 hours a week (per the ostensible employee agreement), and then calculating it against the _real_ hours worked per week after taking a position.
You'd be surprised how illuminating that's been to those Juniors, and how much of an imprint it left on those folks as they progressed in their careers. A lot of people in our industry genuinely don't recognize how much they devalue themselves and diluting their hourly rate when they're putting in 60-80 hours a week.
My dept. is considering moving us from hourly to salary. I've expressed that I don't mind that as long as we get a pay increase equalling expected overtime. Let's see how that plays out.
Of course, while they were quite happy with capping the amount they were paying me (at less than even my existing salary-plus-site-bonus), they always refused to accept a limit (any limit at all, not just one I felt reasonable) on the number of weeks a year I was expected to be away.
Eventually I left and a friend of mine accepted their deal, he ended up racking up 400 hours of overtime (which he never got to take or got paid out) in his first three months.
An employment lawyer and/or the Department of Labor would be very interested in this. It takes more than simply putting someone on salary to exempt them from overtime (in the US).
(Actual limit is 48h/wk, averaged over several weeks.)
Depends what you do, but if you're a "normal" software company you should be able to get away with this. Work smartly - don't waste a bunch of time, recognize how much actual work your people can do in a day - and let them go home to recharge.
But lower-base-pay non-exempt employees sometimes are quoted a salary but with terms that make it a predefined quota of hours and rate that is in practice more like an hourly rate; these positions usually have paid leave so that, unless the leave is exhausted, it mostly only differs from a pure salary in that overtime is paid, either at straight, time-and-half, or double pay, depending on labor law and contract terms.
That depends on one's employment contract.
Funny how it only goes one way. Not many employers are OK with someone taking Friday off because they got their work done early. Lots of employers will see nothing wrong with asking people to come in on the weekend. I think people forget that the employer/employee relationship is a value for value business relationship. As a professional I'm flexible but I'm not exploitable.
But for some reason rush hour starts just after noon on Fridays (at least in the bay area). So many employers seem to have some flexibility.
Taking a salary means you are being responsible for what you achieve, not just mindlessly churning out the required number of hours.
Taking a salaried work means you are being responsible for the well-being of your employees, not just mindlessly handing out fixed amounts of money.
I'm paid a certain amount to do a job, with technically unspecified hours, although with the cultural expectation that it'll be 40 hours per week. If I'm going to spend a few hours with a customer (presumably part of my job, in this hypothetical situation), I'll expect some flexibility next time I've got a couple hours of errands to run during the week.
I'm not so worried about one-off occurrences, but I'll take exception if I start to see a pattern of my hours inching up. 42 hours a week? Doesn't sound like much (24 minutes a day). What do you think would happen if I asked for a 5% raise for 5% more work? Right now, my manager would tell me that we don't have the budget, and his manager would start probing around to see how to spread out my current workload to other employees.
Staff attorneys / in-house counsel are generally salaried and work as described above.
The majority of tech companies and tech employment in the US exists outside of San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle.
There are 6.9 million technology jobs in the US currently. There are about 1.2 million technology jobs in all of California. Just Texas + Florida = 900,000. New York has close to 400,000.
So CA + NY = 1.6 million out of 6.9 million US technology jobs. Not all of those are located in SF, LA, NYC. Also of importance: a very large percentage of that tech workforce in California, consists of a small number of huge tech companies.
The slim minority of tech companies are located in locations with such extreme living expenses. They do represent the extreme outlier outcomes when it comes to producing iconic mega corporations (high value market capitalizations).
It turns out there is an extremely large economy outside of Silicon Valley. See:
Cyberstates 2017 Study
"The definitive state-by-state analysis of the U.S. tech industry"
http://www.cyberstates.org/pdf/CompTIA%20Cyberstates%202017....
I see this a lot; techies are paid well compared to a lot of other industries, and yeah, no argument there.
My question becomes: how much better paid should they be, looking up the company hierarchy, looking at owners/investors/etc?
The question of "what's fair" shouldn't be restrained just to us workers, the comparison should really map out in along a different spectrum.
Back when I was making 35k/yr in Seattle I did the math and could have doubled my take-home working a min-wage job at the hours I was putting in.
The last game studio I worked at measured actual work hours and noted a significant discrepancy between what people thought they worked and what they actually worked. A lot of people over-estimate their load during crunch. Maybe they factor in commutes, maybe they just over-estimate, but a lot of people that though they worked 80 were only in the building for ~60-65. Some people who thought (or at least said) they were pulling 45-50 were actually working 35. Maybe the mental stress of crunch adds phantom hours.
People overestimate their hours when they work places that treat long hours as a sign of commitment or productivity. When the culture expects long hours, people fake long hours.
Either way crunch has no place but that industry has so many wide-eyed people clamoring to get in that I don't see it ever changing.
Got a ton of shit for it too because everyone else usually rolled in at 12-2pm and stayed till 2-3am so the time I worked from 8-12 wasn't noticed and I got called out for leaving "early" at 11pm.
Got into a huge fight with one of our content guys over it which was one of the catalysts for leaving that industry. That along with blowing a red light next to my place 2 times when I realized that job was literally going to kill me.
FWIW the previous gig was pretty similar.
That's not even half of the crazy war stories I have from that industry. I'm always happy to talk to engineers who are interested so I can tell them to stay the fuck away(or learn how to put proper boundaries on working hours, which will get you passed over on career progression).
Once I started managing, I found it extremely difficult to avoid discounting the people "only" working 55 hours rather than the guys who pulled 65. People with kids on my team putting in an extra 3 hours each and every weekday for years, and the company/environment/industry made it seem like slacking.
I more or less missed the first year of one of my kids over a long crunch. Here's to the wives we didn't deserve to keep!
Who about on call? You can be called repeatedly in the middle of the night, every night.
I've seen people being abused to work on days, nights and week end. It's doable.
As a younger person I routinely put in 36h of continuous work. Can’t do that no more.
Some of us actually prefer to sprint then rest.
I laughed.
Actually maybe only 80. Foundin is hard.
It's not a direct comparison, but then again, the jobs are pretty different to begin with.
I know several people who work in union shops, including airlines. They all have adversarial relationships with management. There's a lot of gamesmanship and working to rule even if that prevents actual work from getting done.
It's funny to hear them complaining sometimes about trying to get good vacation slots, etc, because the guys who've been there the longest get all the priority due to union rules and they get what's left over.
And the union seems to be laughing ("Santa Claus giving everyone the day off") about the problem.
And the union contract prevents paying more than 150% to fill the slots.
Yeah, this will go well.
Without having seen that contract, this is almost guaranteed to be false. Most probably the contracts prevents the union to demand more than 150%, but of course the airline is still free to voluntarily pay more than that. This is just a (successful, it seems) PR spin of the situation.
I'm obviously blaming the airline first. But the obvious remedy is to pay the pilots even more than 150%. I wonder what the ultimate solution will be. Maybe it'll be easier to weasel out of it by yanking vacation from employees than simply paying 300% (or something).
My research indicates that this is because in unions pay increases are based purely on seniority. Therefore, it is undesirable (from a union's perspective) to tie wages to anything other than seniority.
Pretty sure this is not correct. The contract most probably prevents the union from demanding more for overwork, but doesn't prevent the employer to voluntarily pay more.
The 150% cap in the contract is most probably a concession the unionized pilots granted in exchange for some benefit, e.g. "we want a better 401k employer match! Ok, but only if you agree to cap maximum overpay at 150%."
Probably, yes, but I could also imagine the union wanting a cap as well, to limit the airline's power to resolve situations like this without having to negotiate with the union. The union is clearly pissed off that the airline hasn't needed to involve them yet. If the airline can't unilaterally offer higher pay to the pilots to fix this problem, that gives the union a chance at benefiting from it.
Besides the other excellent reasons given, these sorts of clauses sometimes exist to protect the company. If the union has control over who works, as is often the case, they could choose to allow excessive overtime and make the airlines pay out for it regardless of whether circumstances really demanded it.
They don't usually do this because it's not in the favor of the union to keep people out of work. But there are always extraneous circumstances that could result in such outcomes, for example a national emergency that causes a shortage of pilots and those who stick around are contractually able to pull in ridiculous overtime while at the same time AA is restricted from changin flight schedules based on labor costs alone, etc.
There is a federal regulation for max number of hours flown per year, so the airlines and unions had to put rate-limits in place to prevent pilots from flying too much in the summer leading to free time off around the holidays.
Nothing about that domain surprises me anymore.
The AA pilots had a big dispute with AA corporate once, and nearly went on strike over it. Instead of striking they took advantage of the fact that they are paid hourly and taxied at a near crawl at the airport, causing delays for every AA flight and costing the airlines money in terms of pay as well as lost revenue. AA pilots are the slowest taxiers to this day, and my friend curses every time he gets behind one.
As a contrast, Southwest pays pilots by the trip, so it's in the pilot's best interest to move quickly. Southwest pilots allegedly send presents to the controllers and in return they get bumped up in line for takeoff and landing.
I always thought this was to limit the incentive to cram extra working hours in (so as to avoid fatigue), interesting that it's probably more of a negotiation point.
The fact that the whole system at all airlines is essentially auction-based with seniority being the currency of the realm is pretty interesting. The low-rank crew seeing time off available those days had to be pretty shocking.
EDIT: spelling
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magen...
Actually, let me correct that. We already have self-flying planes. They're called drones! We don't use them to transport anything as valuable as humans though.
“Langewiesche thinks that we are ultimately heading toward pilotless planes. And by the time that happens, the automation will be so good and so reliable that humans, with all of their fallibility, will really just be in the way.”
Also, I don’t have a hard number for this, but most commercial aviation crashes (like the Air France one, Colgan Air in 2009, AirAsia a few years ago) are due to pilot error or factors that don’t have to do with automation vs pilots (Malaysian Air that was shot down over Ukraine, TWA 800, and others)
Here’s a reference from the BBC (sourcing a Boeing report from 2003) that states that approximately 80% of commercial aviation accidents were caused by pilot error (when the study was performed in 2003).
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20130521-how-human-error-can...
Not the best example IMHO.
I think his point was they always crucify the captain even if its not their direct fault
In a generation, we'll probably add fighter pilots to that list. Commercial pilots? Nah. Not with the current paradigm of passenger planes.
Regarding the elevator comment - what about light rail at airports? Terminal to terminal “air trains” don’t have human drivers.
Also, how would you counter the statistic that 80% of commercial aviation crashes are caused by pilot error (see my above comment for source)? This would seem to suggest that continuing to improve automation with the goal of removing the human altogether would reduce the number of crashes, assuming the automation wouldn’t make the same mistakes as the human.
"Air trains" and some subway lines/systems are automated. Interesting that the only systems that have successfully been automated are literally on rails, and are generally enclosed.
It's a fair assumption that the automation won't make the same mistakes as a human, but it's quite a stretch to assume it won't make it's own special flavor of mistake.
Also, you've pointed out the crashes that humans caused, but not the crashes that were avoided by humans. This is getting far from my field of expertise, but you've got to be careful to avoid selection bias.
Similar things were said about cars. Humans make mistakes at certain rates, in predictable as well as novel situations. When the autopilot performs, on average, better, humans will become a safety liability.
Self driving cars have to outperform the average person who drives like a 100-year-old blind dog who’s texting while driving and drinking a smoothie. Also, their failure mode is easier and much less expensive.
What an excellent counterexample, with all of the driverless cars that actually exist in real life.
Aircraft are downright trivial to automate compared to cars, at least until something goes wrong. The vast majority of the time a car can drop into a fairly reasonable failsafe mode of "steer straight and apply brakes." Aircraft, not so much.
The one thing American travellers are consistent on is choosing the cheapest flight. Autopiloted flights, at a discount, would sell tickets. That said, I don’t think we there yet technologically.
Delta officers and first captains make $320 and $200 thousand, respectively, and fly about 1,000 hours a year [3]. So 520 per hour, between the two of them.
A main-cabin ticket to New York from San Jose, California about 2 months out costs $146. (Its SJC to MSP leg happens to be on a 737.) Flight time is about 6 hours.
Assuming 175 (one-class 737-800 configuration) paying passengers we have about $25,000 in revenues. The captain and first officer’s pay is roughly 12% of that. That’s a lot.
[1] http://www.fi-aeroweb.com/US-Commercial-Aircraft-Fleet.html
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737
[3] http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2016/12/01/delta-pilo...
TBH I think it will take the success of self driving cars, trucks, etc. before the public becomes comfortable with the idea of self flying planes. Ironic since cars are overall the more challenging application, but I guess that's human nature.
Sounds like they have the high tech, but it has a bug. They could fix the bug, and suck up the expense of paying extra $$$ to pilots who give up their holidays.
Or they could opt for a "move fast 'n' break things" startup that is 12 months away from a "sorry we're closing" page.
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/ryanair...
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4512660/pilots-leave-ryanair-m...
I got my flight cancelled because of that but got ~400$ in compensation.
BTW the exact same thing happened to Easyjet. My gf’s flight from barcelona to London got cancelled and she had to find a place to stay for one more day and a different flight. Easyjet refuses to refund or compensate her, mentioning strikes in France. Same shit as Ryanair, different reactions.
Anybody knows what are our recourse?
But this is also a red herring because I don't think sabre is used to manage pilots times off.
"If we offer your a bonus, you might not get paid the bonus" either means the management is horrible/dishonest or the union are assholes and bitter about being excluded from negotiations, or more likely, both.
[1]https://www.alliedpilots.org/News/ID/5646/Holiday-Scheduling...
http://www.star-telegram.com/news/business/aviation/sky-talk...
I imagine no one at AA is wringing their hands in glee at this situation
Also the Ryan Air glitch didn't cause this to register with anyone in management at American Airlines when it was big news a few months ago?
Equally egregious given that these companies are essentially in the logistics business.
I agree that "you all" shortened to "y'all" is the appropriate form.