Blame Cost-Cutting

Ah, to be young and an aspiring commercial pilot. The exotic destinations, the fabulous friendships, the wealth and the girls (or guys, as the case may be). But these days, that vision of an airline pilot's life is changing -- getting a little less bright and a little more like work. Face it: Commercial flying is losing its luster.

The hours are longer. The vacations are fewer and farther between. Wages are shrinking faster than a cotton shirt in a hot water wash and even the perks are starting to disappear.

"In this industry there was always the promise that at the end of the hard road to becoming an airline pilot you'd have a great schedule and make good money," JetBlue pilot Brian Humphreys told the Denver Rocky Mountain News. "But that's not necessarily true anymore. From one month to the next, there's always something new creeping up in this industry. It's still a good job, but it's certainly not what it used to be."

You'll probably get some argument here, but the biggest of the changes began around the time the industry seriously slumped, right after 9/11. Since then, the industry has lost about 136,000 jobs -- almost a third of the workforce. For those who weren't laid off, the news is only barely better. Wages have tumbled, on the flight deck, in the cabin and on the ground.

"Airlines have cut back on everything imaginable, from wages and pensions to less obvious things like sponsorship of employee clubs and donations of tickets," said Henry Harteveldt, a vice president at Forrester Research in San Francisco, in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News. "Workers have suffered so much in terms of wage givebacks, longer hours, being away from home more often, less time between meals, more aggressive production rules and lower wages."

As Harry Stonecipher, the former Boeing president and CEO ousted after a sex scandal involving one of his own employees, said earlier this month, labor is right at the top of the list of airline expenses. "It's not fuel," Stonecipher said, referring to the macro-jumps in fuel prices over the last 18 months. "Everybody says, 'oh, it's oil causing all this.' Well, oil doesn't cause that.... If you're in the plastics molding business, [the rising cost of] oil probably affects you more than it does the airlines.

"Right now," Stonecipher said, "if you look at the majors in this country... Delta, United, Northwest, American, US Air... you have a cost up here that 47-percent of is labor cost."

Perhaps not eloquent, but certainly to the point.

Where does that leave the folks on the flightline and behind the ticket counter? They're making less money, doing more work and taking less time off. And in some cases, the job is actually a bit more dangerous.

"It's totally a different job now," said Sara Nelson Dela Cruz, a spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants -- also interviewed by the Rocky Mountain News. "Now we're the last line of defense on an airplane before the cockpit. To come to work and carry that on your shoulders is huge."

So where's the silver lining? Well, passenger loads are up. Low-cost carriers are, for the most part, able to shelter their workers from the industry contraction going on around them. Companies like Southwest and JetBlue are actually profiting -- and have been all along.

"I don't have to worry right now," Natalie Ordakowski, a Denver-based flight attendant who's been with Frontier for more than 10 years and previously worked for Continental, in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News. "We've never had pay cuts, we still get the company 401(k) match, we still get yearly pay increases. I feel bad for other people who are losing everything they have."

Some speculate that the incredible shrinking airline industry is a good thing for the companies that can survive. Consider: With lower pay, longer hours and harder work, the people who come into the industry from this point forward had better love aviation.

"This is an industry that historically has had a fair amount of junkies working in it, doing what they love to do," said George Hamlin, a director at Merge Global. He told the News, "That's not going away unless conditions change much more drastically."

FMI: www.jet-jobs.com