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Comment by flerchin | Hacker News Reader

The best airline pilot lands the plane the same as the worst.

The best airline pilots get the best routes for the best airlines and are mostly retired military. At the other end you have cargo pilots and regional flights that carry a brand of major airline but are operated by a different company.

Look at salary differences.

https://www.thepilotguys.com/blog/airline-pilot-salary

>The best airline pilots get the best routes for the best airlines and are mostly retired military.

Curious about this. I'd have thought going the civilian route of flight school should put one on equal footing on this regard? Or are you saying that just statistically more long-tenured pilots are retired military?

In general, these are due to union rules. The union decides what the compensation is, and it's largely by seniority. The airline makes no more money from retired military pilots than they do from any other pilot.

Yeah the best developer uses the same compiler of the worst, guess the difference is not what you do at the end, but how you manage the trip, and how you write code before

>The best airline pilot lands the plane the same as the worst

Have you considered there's more to being a pilot than landing the plane?

Plenty more, but the economic impact to the airline is the same from any individual pilot.

Not really. The worst pilot only lands once, and never again.

Now what qualifies as landing?

Collect a large number of pilots, divide them into two pools based upon their performance (low and high). Which pool do you think will incur more expenses to the airline? Keep in mind that some of those costs range from reducing consumer confidence (poor landings or damaged cargo), to planes requiring more maintenance (increased costs of maintenance, planes taken out of service more often), to planes being put out of commission (regardless of whether everyone walks away or not).

A lot of people seem to be measuring value in landings per day, widgets per minute, lines of code per week without acknowledging that the quality of work does have an impact.

There's only acceptable piloting and not. There's no pilot that makes the airline 10x more per flight.

99.999% of the time I agree with you.

Sure, just the integrity of the plane after landing vary sometimes.

With a few notable outliers...

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