Lost Highway: The trials of trucking school | Hacker News Reader

Lost Highway: The trials of trucking school

harpers.org

33 pointssamclemens42 comments

I just recently went through the process at age 49 to get my pilot's license. Purely for fun, however the vast majority of the students that I trained with were just like many of the hopefuls in this article - pursuing a high paying career.

I could write a book about flight school management dynamics. The personalities, the hopefuls, the dreamers, the wild power dynamics between a flight school and a student who desperately wants to get to the airlines (the promise land). The instructors, who all were just recently students now grinding out hours to qualify for an airline job. Safety. Studying and learning. Relationships. Accidents.

The financial aspects are incredibly risky for many. The statistics: only 22% of students who begin training for the first step - a private pilot license - end up finishing. For those wanting to make a career or progress further, there's your instrument rating (to fly in bad weather), your commercial license (to fly for money), your flight instructor license (so you can teach - which essentially is your only path to gaining experience/hours without having to pay for it out of pocket), and then your Air Transport license, which ... airlines. That requires 1500 hours of experience.

It truly was one of the more fascinating adventures I've done.

>teach - which essentially is your only path to gaining experience/hours without having to pay for it out of pocket

Flying for a military organization is another path, is it not?

Or do the airlines no longer want former military pilots? I know they used to hire a lot of them.

Yes, this is an avenue into the career of being an airline pilot. However being a military pilot doesn't directly translate to being what is essentially a bus driver, and there is extensive retraining that has to occur.

But yes, the airlines recruit and bring in a ton of military pilots.

A few months ago a former Navy guy mentioned to me that you can tell if your pilot is Navy or Air Force by the landing. Air Force pilots will come in nice and smooth, but Navy pilots, having been trained to land on carriers, will hit hard.

I don’t know if there is truth to that, but if so, I’ve definitely had more than a few Navy pilots.

My cousin - RIP - who was former Air Force, flew for FedEx. He said he preferred flying freight to passengers because you didn't have to worry about being has gradual on the climb out or smooth on the approach and landing and he didn't have to deal with annoying passengers. ;)

Probably the 'optimal' path to a pilot's job would be to fly bulk for the military (boring things like the C130), not the fighters, and transition to a freight airline.

The UPS planes out of Ontario, CA would climb a hell of a lot faster than the passenger jets out of LAX.

It's kind of a fun old wives tale that is humorous, but not really a thing in practice.

Some of the biggest challenges military pilots face transitioning to the airlines are that the vast majority of them worked far more independently in their roles in the military. So cockpit resource management for a lot of them is a huge challenge. Airline pilots also are responsible for a lot more "working with the masses" type work.

No. Any Navy pilot is skilled enough to flare. The descent rate necessary to land on a carrier is 600-800 feet per minute, which would literally break the landing gear on any airliner, or at least cause a hard landing inspection to have to be done to the airframe looking for potential damage.

Airliners and civilian aircraft "hit hard" for two reasons usually. Either the pilot mildly goofed the flare and "dropped it in" slightly at the end, or else the runway is slick and/or short. In which case, they are aiming to put the aircraft down early and somewhat firmly so they can get on the thrust reversers and/or brakes quickly. A nice greaser of a landing tends to allow the aircraft to float awhile in ground effect, and sometimes the runway is short or slick enough that style points don't count.

> Either the pilot mildly goofed the flare and "dropped it in" slightly at the end

It's funny, I'm sure it's much more difficult in a plane, but this sounds like such a similar experience to thinking you've braked smoothly but accidentally having your final complete stop become sharp because you've overestimated how much speed you've shed.

It's more or less the same thing. You look down the runway as you break your descent rate, and then use your peripheral vision to kind of ease the aircraft down smoothly. But the whole time you're doing this, you're bleeding airspeed and eventually the aircraft doesn't want to fly any more. So if you end up just a smidge higher than you thought . . . clunk.

If you really screw it up, you need to go around, or else you'll have a hard landing. Which is embarrassing at best and career-ending at worst depending on what it does to the aircraft.

I'm getting close to retirement and have been considering getting a pilot's license. My only reservation is the expense of fuel/rental when I get bored of flying around my city/area.

Curious to hear more about your journey and how you reckon with the expense of getting into the air for fun.

your reckoning with the expense of getting into the air for fun is this: Go take about $2000 in various denominations and flush it down the toilet. Did that feel good? /s

If that didn't hurt too bad, you're past the first hurdle.

What about all the relatively poor Alaskans who fly small planes around (no roads, tracking animals, checking traps)? What are the dynamics such that they can afford that lifestyle?

there are exceptions to every rule. Alaska and aviation is literally the wild west. The dynamics are they essentially have to make it work.

Like the similar situation in Australia, there's a strong culture of "you'll probably only kill yourself" that allows a lot of things to be overlooked.

Cutting corners.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-tallied-alaska-avi...

> A KUCB and ProPublica analysis has found that in recent years, Alaska has accounted for a growing share of the country’s fatalities from crashes involving small commercial aircraft. Since 2016, 42% of the country’s deaths in these crashes occurred in Alaska, up from 26% in the early 2000s.

The percentage of aircraft crashes in Alaska in the 60s that involved alcohol was depressingly high.

Flying comes down to a "dollars per minute" - you can rent a plane "wet" today for $120-200 an hour (depending on your location) - which translates to $2 per minute or about $1 a mile.

Rental prices include everything so you can own your own plane for less, it'll be ancient and old, and if you do your own maintenance it can be even cheaper.

If you rent less than about 150 hours/year, you probably can't own for less money. (The first minute each year costs about $20K [calendar-based maintenance, hangar, insurance, databases/avionics subscriptions]; every hour after that costs less than renting.)

Most people who own do so for flexibility rather than savings. It usually costs more to own, but it also lets you get a plane you probably can't rent, configure it the way you want, leave all the headsets and supplies in the plane, fly it when you want without scheduling, fly it somewhere and stay for a week without paying daily minimums, etc.

That matches my math when I was flying, if you're not doing 10+ hours a month or have a specific mission that can't be solved by rentals, you're best off renting.

There's a middle-ground which is quite common of the "own a share" - you and five others buy and maintain a plane and "rent" it from yourself - this works great if the times you want to fly don't all overlap.

The partnership angle is a great one!

I really wish I could have found great partners two decades ago. (I'd probably have a lot more money in the bank now, even if it meant we'd have missed more Christmas trips or moved that travel to the airlines because a partner had the airplane.)

If you do the bare minimum to earn your license, but only actually fly a few times/year, you are more dangerous than not earning your license at all. There's a break-in period where you have to get enough hours to be comfortable. Keep that in mind, and it's ok to quit (i.e. just get the license for the challenge of it and never use it if you lose interest, if you have that much money to burn), but pick one of (fly reguarly | dont fly at all).

> That requires 1500 hours of experience.

That seems awfully low, can you get to be a commercial airline pilot with those hours?

In the boat world, getting the entry level commercial license (OUPV) would take a minimum of 1440 hours on the water (it's measured in days, not hours, so would usually be more). And all you can do with that is transport 6 people or less.

So it sounds wild that with essentially the same number of practice hours you could be piloting an airliner with lots of people!

I’ve worked in freight tech for almost a decade (as in, I specifically work on a bunch of different software for drivers to use amongst other things).

Many of our customers are the biggest fleets in the world. Each has their own relationship to driver turn over.

The ones who don’t struggle with turn over do 3 things:

1) they pay them well (sometimes 6 figures+)

2) they route their freight in a way that gets their drivers home consistently and frequently

3) they don’t separate between “employees” and “drivers”…everyone is an employee, everyone matters

Truck driving is a top 3 occupation in America, everything we consume relies on trucking at some point in its lifecycle.

The simple fact here: everyone sucks at planning freight moves in a way that affords drivers ability to get home frequently. Almost all freight moves are the result of humans bashing away on keyboards connected to AS400 terminals. You’d expect some insanely well architected network optimization algorithm (and some fleets sort of have that don’t get me wrong), but in reality, planning freight moves is basically still just note cards on a cork board, just typed into computers. The dilemma here is that fixing these things with software is very hard, almost always requiring practical operation experience in trucking in addition to deep tech knowledge.

There are some leaders in the space who claim “we don’t have a driver shortage, we just suck at planning freight moves optimally enough”. I subscribe to that idea 110%, while also acknowledging it’s a generally unappealing job for an increasingly white collar-oriented younger culture we have entering the workforce.

It’s important we keep seeing investment flow into freight tech, and hopefully not too much into the misguided self driving truck efforts that will never be feasible in our lifetime for practical/legal/cost reasons (though I’ll admit the safety advancements those investments throw off are great…my point is just that trucks will not be moving without drivers for decades/potentially ever because of so many different variables, including the most important one: trucking is a single digit margin business, and Americans expect everything to only get cheaper and faster that they consume, so increasing logistics costs through more expensive automated equipment is at odds with the consumer demands).

It’s also important we respect truck drivers. They do a hard job most of us would never do, but we all depend on them doing it so we can live our cushy lives. They can’t be the butt of jokes.

"The dilemma here is that fixing these things with software is very hard, almost always requiring practical operation experience in trucking in addition to deep tech knowledge."

But...why? Surely we have the tech, data, processing, and decades of collective analog wisdom to do this. If Amazon can optimize their entire delivery network, why not trucking?

(I get it's still a challenge but surely not insurmountable? And likely incredibly profitable as a saas... so what are some of the less obvious complicating factors?)

The biggest factor is that you don't have one company owning everything, like Amazon does with their network.

You can call UPS and get them to take a pallet somewhere, and it stays in the "UPS delivery network" but the vast majority of freight is not shipped that way (it's quite expensive).

For full truckloads you're usually dealing with a broker who finds a company or independent operator who is willing to take the load to where you want it, or if that is not available then the broker will find a chain of companies that will get you the result you want. This often involves calling or faxing to various "hubs" that he thinks will work.

For LTL (less than truckload, think pallets) it is even worse - your pallet will be taken to a local warehouse by a local driver, and then combined with other pallets to another warehouse, and potentially a whole chain of these. The brokers work even harder on these.

It is not insurmountable, but "modernization" doesn't get you much of a benefit at all until it's all modernized, so there's not much budget for "lets' modernize and have no benefit for 20 years".

Change management is really damn hard. And I don't necessarily mean technical change management, I mean changing the behavior of millions of employees, many who often only know working for that one fleet their whole career, because their parents worked there before them.

OT: there is a 'dead' comment by a user going under the handle gazelle21 [1] at the same level as this comment which seems to have been insta-killed which most likely means this user has been shadowbanned. The actual comment does not merit killing as it is related to the subject of this discussion and does not contain anything 'sensitive' or 'triggering' unless the sensitivity levels have been turned up higher. Going through this user's comment history I notice that most of the comments and al the submissions - going back to 2019 - are 'dead' but - and this is the odd thing - some are alive. I did not see any warning from dang to this user that he was about to be banned if he did not change his ways nor did I see any particularly shadowban-worthy comments or submissions. The user's 'karma' level is positive so that is not the reason for the untimely expiration of his comments either.

Why was this comment killed? I have been told that shadowbanning is not practised here but can not think of anything else other than this user being watched by a number of particularly vengeful detractors who jump to the down-vote/flag options any time a post or submission appears. The comment itself fits the discussion so that can not be the reason. What is?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gazelle21

> Long-haulers, lauded as the backbone of our economy, live out of their trucks for weeks at a time, often working eighty-plus-hour weeks while earning little more than minimum wage. The economist Michael Belzer has equated commercial trucking to working in a “sweatshop on wheels.” The shortage is, in fact, a retention problem: annual turnover at large fleets in recent years has exceeded 90 percent.

90% turnover. That is insane.

That insanely high figure is also why the predicted labor strike against automation of long haul trucking likely won't happen. Very few love the job and most who have experienced it quickly leave. It's one of those cases where not many will be put out of work should self driving ever come to be. Short haul on the other hand seems to be growing, pays better and probably is more difficult to automate.

Factory workers and coal miners in the 1800s probably didn't love their jobs, either. They still needed them, though, and thus... organized labor.

If you have 90% turnover it means that people indeed don't need this particular job.

They may need a trucking job, though. It depends quite a bit on where they turnover to.

If they're largely jumping from trucking company to trucking company, a strike is still entirely feasible.

I would disagree with your reasoning. The high turnover and a short tenure means people are not very attached to the job but more importantly it also means the drivers in any given trucking company don't know each other very well and it would be quite difficult for them to organize for a common cause such as a strike. Way to easy for the trucking company to play the drivers against each other.

What’s actually insane: for many fleets, 90% turnover would be considered amazingly good. Some fleets suffer from 300%+ turnover!

these non-trucking magazines that constantly claim there is a driver shortage should explain the extreme excess in supply and shortage of demand.

do we need these drivers rolling at below cost before we start claiming the shortage is over? the data we look at in the trucking industry isn't indicating a shortage, many of us in the industry are perplexed by the constant "driver shortage" claims but i think people might just be used to news that doesnt tell the truth

Claiming labor shortages in particular industries increases supply, which lowers wages.

It may be partially intentional, or at least advantageous to the companies. There's a common model where a company pays for the driving school and then the driver leases a truck from the company.

The driver is technically an owner-operator, and has all the expenses and risks of that, but are contracted to the company to "pay off" the school fees and so are effectively an employee. If they quit the company gets the truck back and the driver has to repay the school fees. A very cheap & low risk way for the company to have drivers, if they can manage the turnover.

This is the case, and the turnover usually involves the driver going to another company. Often those big "signup deals" you see for drivers are to pay off the previous company if necessary.

Once a driver has some experience they will settle down in a company that doesn't turn over as much, or actually become a real owner-operator.

>>90% turnover. That is insane.

Yup

It screams to me: Bad Management

There are evidently companies that can retain workers

There is obviously a lot more demand for trucks rolling on the road than supply

this might be how they want it though. The industry knows there is a steady stream of newly licensed, but completely inexperienced drivers. If some companies are willing to take the risk on them, but pay less, this could be a good introductory job for them. both parties know the employee will quit once he has enough hours to get hired by a better firm. the better firm has a different risk model, where they only hire drivers with X-month employment with no accidents. In return, they are willing to pay a premium.

An entertaining book about trucking. But perhaps much has changed since 2017:

The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road by Finn Murphy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36236118-the-long-haul

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