Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepGem | Hacker News Reader

Well, I wouldn't doubt one of the best airlines on the planet. However, the article claims that they hire pilots with lower flying hours as they cannot find experienced pilots like American or United does. I fail to understand this. Can't they just hire experienced pilots from other airlines instead of hiring the inexperienced ones ?

View on HN

They can't, because their working conditions are terrible compared to those other airlines. Nobody with thousands of hours of jet time would ever switch from a US or EU legacy carrier to someone like Emirates.

This is pretty sad. Emirates, for all their glory doesn't pay their pilots well. I mean, what's the point in spending on stuff like fancy first class seats and all that without paying pilots well. True irony. Fanciest and the most comfortable airline for the passengers, the exact opposite for the pilots.

It’s more a question of Emirates being a relative newcomer with no strong unionization, and therefore not having to align with the absurdly high salaries the legacy carriers are saddled with. Compared with other new airlines (EasyJet, Ryanair etc) Emirates pay quite well

It's not just pay, it's also very demanding schedules (which is a safety concern, many incidents happen due to crew fatigue) and zero labor protection in UAE laws. I know a few ex-Emirates pilots that got fired during the pandemic, they were treated like trash almost literally thrown out of the country.

Even for the rich, there are benefits to living in a society that treats workers well.

I've been a frequent flyer of Emirates for the past ~ six years. From my perspective, the airline suddenly changed about three years ago. The quality of their service dropped and still every time that I take an EK flight, I notice something else is missing from the service. Flying Emirates does not have any glory anymore.

They still have some of the brand association of luxury, but indeed it's a very normal airline just like all the others. With similar service, legroom and food. But with no direct flights, which is less comfortable.

Comes down to a few things. First, money. Second, location. Third, skill.

The Middle East doesn't have nearly the pool of pilots to start with compared to North America, and even NA is suffering from an extreme shortage of pilots. (Wonder why the airlines no longer fly to your small town? Probably because of a shortage of pilots)

Is there actually a pilot shortage, or is there a pay shortage? Most of the people I know who wanted to be pilots bounced off of the extremely low salary for a very long time. Unless someone does military and gets a lot of hours, and even then not always, they are stuck paying for their own license then making a bit above minimum wage flying between cleveland to nashville or something like that. If the airlines paid more money I think the shortage would probably disappear quickly.

Pilots for large airlines are paid very well (100k-200k+). The training is expensive and time-consuming, but not that expensive or that time-consuming, if we compare to e.g. medicine or science.

There is a low-paid and debt-heavy portion of the career. However, Medical students aren't paid and even the lowest-paid pilot is making more than the average phd candidate.

The fact that medical students have it hard doesn't justify it being bad for the pilots.

Also it's probably easier to get student loans for medicine than it is for piloting.

Maybe the regional carriers should pay more and have better conditions but funny how they describe it as a "pilot shortage". It's just supply and demand.

new commercial pilots who are flying small airplanes for large airlines in the usa (eg “united express” pilots) barely crack 50k usd salary. and this is after big pay rises the last year.

Some of both: An early-career pay shortage leads to an actual shortage of experienced pilots to fly big jets.

You can, of course, easily solve the problem by raising wages for regional jet pilots, but it takes a few years for the excess pilots to propagate to the major carriers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com