I have to say, that article is not very convincing. It reads more like a
bitter "junior pilot" complaining about his superiors he believed treated
him badly and got unevenly rewarded because of union seniority. The few
references he makes overall about pilots union effects on airlines are
speculative or just straight extrapolation, most of it is just about the
disparity between senior and junior staffers, which is maybe unfair, but
meaningless to overall cost to the airline if they balance out. The
'positive feedback' effect he proposes exists in all industries, you just
swap out 'senior pilots' for 'management', no evil unions are required to
ensure that expensive powerful people are protected at the cost of junior
expendables.
The numbers don't quite work either. Even if an airplane is staffed by
super senior pilots($300k/yr), who are making only that flight that day,
their salaries amount to 821 dollars a day, so even three of them would
hardly make a dent in the average take on a flight cross country ($54k).
Particularly when compared to the fuel costs ($34k right now for a 767),
which fluctuate in value more than the three super senior pilots salaries
put together in an average year in one such fill up according to
http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=jet-fuel .
On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 9:21 AM, Norman Yarvin <yarvin@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 03:27:26AM +0100, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
First, that the reason why airlines make little or no profit is because
they have too much investment, because other forces - which I will
consolidate under the term NIG, for "National Interest and Glamour" -
invest at least partly for non-financial reasons, and their investments
support competitive zero-profit pricing.
I too once thought that, but I've since run into a good argument that
the main cause is a strange interaction between union law and FAA
rules which gives pilots' unions so much power that they can gobble up
all the profits:
http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines
There is no reason for this particular disorder to propagate into
spaceflight. And even when it comes to airlines, while it means you
should avoid buying stock in an airline, it's fine to buy stock in the
leasing companies which own the planes that the airlines fly.
--
Norman Yarvin http://yarchive.net/blog
