Like Flight 3407’s co-pilot, Rebecca Shaw, Capt. Dave Ryter earned around $17,000 in his first year with a regional carrier and flew coast-to-coast just to get to work…
14- to 16-hour duty days, much of that time unpaid and spent waiting in crew lounges.
With no food on planes, pilots grab meals on the run from airport fast-food stands.
…holiday and overtime pay don’t exist.
To earn six to eight hours of pay, “you can come to work at seven in the morning for an eight o’clock departure and park your last flight at nine o’clock that night…”
I wondered if there would be follow up after the commuter airline crash in Buffalo. It’s creepy to think about.
Exhausted, under-trained — and paid less than the bus or cab drivers who’d ferried their passengers to the airport.
“We have been calling for years trying to get the public to understand what their lifestyle is really like,” said Capt. Paul Rice, first vice president of the Air Line Pilots Association, International, the nation’s largest pilot’s union, representing 54,000 flyers.