I half-joked that if John was younger and more junior, I could probably guess with reasonable accuracy whether he was a “McChord C-17,” “Whidbey P-3,” or “Whidbey Growler” guy. This is because even though military pilots make up less than half of my airline’s new hires for the first time in our history, they comprise a surprisingly high percentage of the newbies in the Seattle 737 base. I attribute this to the presence of multiple nearby Air Force and Navy Reserve units, which allow pilots who have recently separated from active duty to continue to fly for the military part-time, building toward the 20 years of service that merits a government retirement and healthcare. The largest of these is the Air Force’s 446th Airlift Wing, with three squadrons of C-17s at McChord AFB in Tacoma, Washington. Up at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, there are three Navy Reserve squadrons: VP-69 (until recently flying the Lockheed P-3 Orion, now converted to the Boeing P-8A Poseidon), VAQ-209 (EA-18G Growler), and VR-61 (Boeing C-40A Clipper).

My limited claim to omniscience perked up John’s attention and he demanded, with a grin, that I take a stab at his background. I knew he was retired military, but his demeanor offered few clues to branch, base, or aircraft. I guessed McChord C-17 and was wrong; in fact, John spent 20 years flying and teaching on P-3s for the Navy and Navy Reserve. But he also spent years in Boeing Flight Test and has been at our airline for six years, which is more than enough to blur the differences not only between military branches and communities but also between military and civilian pilots. Molded by our various backgrounds and experiences, time spent in the airline’s culture tends to erode the edges of all but a few particular individuals.

There was a time, when I was quite young, that my bedroom was adorned with F-16 posters and I had aspirations of military flying. At 12 years old, I was disabused of the notion by an Air National Guard recruiter who noted my substandard eyesight—in those days before LASIK acceptance—barred me from a flight slot in every branch. No matter; I committed to the civilian path and stuck with it.

I had little contact with military aviators at the regional airlines. Horizon had a few Vietnam-era guys on the cusp of retirement, and they were a wild-and-wooly lot even in their dotage. At Compass almost everyone was civilian, but my initial simulator training partner, Rich Metcalf, was a former Air Force F-15C driver who hadn’t touched an airplane in eight years. He had never flown a transport category jet, nor a multicrew airplane, nor one with a glass cockpit or flight management system. Yet for all that, he was magnificent, arguably the sharpest training partner I’ve had in a happy procession of excellent ones.

The major airlines, by their hiring practices, gave credence to the popular notion that military selection and training produced superior pilots, and in Rich I seemed to find terrible confirmation of my inherent inferiority. But then, six years later, I was hired at my current airline, where 95 percent of the captains I flew with were former military aviators. I was startled to find just how similar they were to the pilots I’d known in my decade at the regional airlines. Some were very sharp, others less so; some had natural flying ability, others were wooden; many were kindhearted souls, a few were loudmouthed boors. Every single one made mistakes I’d seen a dozen times before, mistakes I’d made myself. These folks were not superhuman at all; they were working pilots like me. Relieved of my lingering sense of inferiority, I got along famously with almost all these captains and really enjoyed hearing stories of the Ronald Reagan-era military: chasing Russian subs during the Cold War, intercepting TU-95s off the Aleutian Islands, landing on a heaving carrier deck in a typhoon. Often these captains, so used to flying with birds of their own feather, were quite interested to hear my own stories of dark, anxious nights spent alone in the thrumming cocoon of an ancient, overloaded Piper Navajo.

Every once in a while, I’d fly with someone who had never really left the service in their own mind, whose whole identity and ego were wrapped up in their past as a military aviator (most often in the single-seat fighter community). Such captains occasionally earned themselves a private eye roll, but for the most part I indulgently peppered them with questions about their past, to which they predictably rose like a choice trout to a well-presented fly. I received hours of entertaining, most certainly embellished tales out of the deal, plus more than a few free layover beers.

Once I upgraded to captain, I continued to fly with many military pilots, but now they were mostly my age or younger and had been hired within the last few years. Unlike the mostly peacetime Reagan-era captains, these folks spent much of their adult lives at the pointy end of the two-decade “global war on terror.”

The differences are interesting: The egos are smaller, even among fighter jocks, there’s a great deal more diversity, and there’s much more skepticism about the military’s role in the world—and more frank discussion about the highs and lows of service life. I am constantly impressed by the high quality of our new hires, both military and civilian. With rare exceptions, they are extremely sharp individuals and great cockpit companions. They make my job easy. The military pilots, in particular, must learn a great deal in their first months at the airline, especially if they haven’t been flying transport category or multicrew aircraft. Most are very quickly up to speed. I’ve come to realize the airlines’ preference for military aviators isn’t because they’re necessarily superior pilots but because they are predictably trainable in stressful environments. They are used to “drinking through a fire hose.”

A year or two into these pilots’ airline careers, it’s increasingly difficult to tell what branch they came from, even if they continue to fly in the reserves. Another year later, you can’t tell them apart from the civilians. The military pilots have relaxed while the civilians have added some spit and polish. After a few years, most everyone has drifted to a happy medium, which is on the whole a quite good standard—and a big part of the airlines’ enviable safety record the past two decades.

Speaking of which, during our flight to Phoenix, John and I had a eureka moment in which we recalled the details of our previous trip. It was the day of the Christmas bomb cyclone I wrote about in the March issue, with historically terrible weather in Boston, Detroit, and Seattle. John was a fantastic first officer that day, but his cool competence in tough conditions was so utterly normal to my experience that it didn’t make him particularly memorable. This is a great credit not only to John but to all the excellent first officers, military and civilian, with whom I ply the nation’s skies every week. As I near the top third of the seniority list, these folks coming up behind me are becoming the backbone of our airline, remolding our culture in their image. It is a very heartening thing to see.

This column first appeared in the July 2023/Issue 939 print edition of FLYING.

The post Taking Wing: Beyond the Uniform appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

When Dawn and I bought our previous airplane, a 1953 Piper Pacer, we vowed to fly it at least ten hours a month, and indeed we clocked some 220 hours over 18 months of ownership. This time around, I’ve only flown our Stinson 40 hours since buying it in August. This is partly because Pacific Northwest winters, while much milder than in Minnesota, offer far fewer days that are flyable in a strictly VFR airplane. Secondly, I’ve been quite busy finishing our hangar apartment and that’s taken up the vast majority of my time when I’m not flying for work.

Still, I know there is nothing worse for an airplane—or a pilot!—than sitting on the ground, and so I’ve tried to take the Stinson for at least a short flight once every week or two to get the oil up to temp. Unfortunately for the last month it has been imprisoned in its hangar by an impressively solid 44-by-15-foot Higher Power hydraulic door frame, which we assembled and hoisted into place before we had power in the hangar to actually open it. The electrician finally showed up only yesterday after several weeks’ delay. In the interim, we have had some beautiful VFR days that hint at the coming of spring, and I’ve been rather frustrated at my inability to take my flightless bird aloft.

Yes, I have been flying the Boeing 737 plenty—a bit more than I’d like, actually. And I’ll admit, there have been periods of my life where airline flying scratched that itch I’ve had since childhood. It just doesn’t quite do the trick right now. This probably seems absurd to the multitude of young pilots just beginning their careers, casting about for any bit of flight time they can snag and dreaming of the prospect of getting their hands on anything that burns jet-A. I know this; I was that kid once. To me, it doesn’t seem so long ago.

When I started flying in 1994, I had just turned thirteen. Age and finances dictated that flight lessons were a once-a-month event, and I remember the intense yearning that accompanied each ground-bound interval. I thought about flying, talked about flying, literally dreamed about flying as I mowed lawns, shoveled driveways, and did odd jobs to scratch together the $58 that would buy an hour of dual in the Cessna 150. Every once in a while I came up short, and then there was an excruciating two-month flightless gap—and one of eleven weeks in which I tearfully contemplated quitting. As I got older and found steady work, though, the lessons became more frequent, especially in the run-up to my 16th and 17th birthdays. Nothing made me happier than being able to fly most every week. It was in this frame of mind that I chose to pursue a flying career.

At eighteen, I headed to the University of North Dakota and, unleashed by my sudden freedom to amass eye-watering student loans, seldom went three days without flying. I was in hog heaven for the first year or so. But I still remember the first time I woke up and realized, with a groan, that I had a flight scheduled for that morning. A lightbulb went off: So this is what it means to be a professional pilot. You don’t always want to fly, and you do it anyway. That realization was punctuated during my first summer of flight instructing in Southern California when I flew 400 hours in three months and had only a few days off.

Continuing to instruct during my senior year at UND, my logbook records a ten-day flightless gap from September 7 to 17, 2001. It seemed much longer, and flying felt very different thereafter. I knew that my career had just taken a drastic turn, and I steeled myself for an extended grind. In the two years after graduation, while instructing and flying Part 135 cargo, the only time I went more than two days without flying was a nine-day pause for my wedding and honeymoon. Freight dogging, in particular, was incredibly tough—in retrospect, the hardest and most dangerous flying I ever did. And yet my overarching memory of that period was how flying became completely commonplace: It was just what I did. Fascination was replaced by familiarity. I didn’t lose my love of flight, but its nature changed markedly. If taking wing no longer made my heart flutter, I found joy and comfort in looking down upon the unsuspecting world from my daily perch, and being truly and utterly at home.

Now being ground-bound held no measure of yearn- ing for me, for I always knew that I’d return to my home in the air soon enough. At the regional airlines, I bid schedules that created flightless gaps of weeks or even a month, the better to accommodate terrestrial pursuits like backcountry camping, motorcycling, and international travel. I got back into general aviation, started flying old taildraggers, and rediscovered the sort of flight that still makes my heart go pitter-patter (sea- planes, gliders, and skydiving do the trick, too). When I was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and was grounded from flying airliners while awaiting a special issuance medical, sport pilot rules still allowed me to fly a Piper J-3 Cub, which was a great comfort as I pondered the possibility of a life in which the sky was no longer home. My return to the flight deck after four months’ absence was a joyful affair, and I vowed never to take my privileged position for granted again.

And then, after I’d been hired at my current airline, Dawn and I decided to sell our home and the Pacer, buy a 42-foot sailboat, and run away to sea. I transferred to a highly seasonal fleet and base that allowed me to take lots of time off during the cruising season, and for the first time since I was 13, I voluntarily ventured no higher than sea level for months at a time. Bearded and shirtless, I’d look up from tropical anchorages to spy an airliner flying far overhead, and it’d seem like a relic from another lifetime. Every eight weeks or so I’d endure a brutal shave and dig my mildew-spotted uniform out of the hanging locker, and then I’d commute up to Atlanta to reacquaint myself with the pleasures of flying the Boeing 757. It was always slightly unsettling at first, but by leg two it would be like I’d never left.

That’s what it feels like right now, as our roaring Stinson lifts from the grass and claws its way above the towering firs, revealing a striking panorama: the tree- lined, deep-blue ribbon of Hood Canal, backed by the snow-blanketed breadth of the jagged Olympics. It’s been eight weeks, but Dawn and I and our faithful old Stinson are comfortably back in our home element. The Franklin growls steadily as we gain altitude, and the full glory of our adopted corner of the world—snow-capped volca- noes, rolling hills, an intricate maze of saltwater coves and passages, sleepy fishing villages, gleaming steel cities, and—over it all—a dark-green carpet of giant firs and cedars—unveils itself before our eyes. This, too, is home. Here I am content. Here, with my adventurous wife by my side and with a good old airplane in which to explore our fascinating world, my wandering heart is full.

This column first appeared in the June 2023/Issue 938 print edition of FLYING.

The post A Flightless Bird Returns to the Skies appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

According to data from pilot career advisory group FAPA, major U.S. airlines hired a total of 2,116 pilots between September and October. The group’s data includes hiring trends from 13 U.S. airlines, including Delta, American, and United, along with smaller carriers such as Spirit, Frontier, and JetBlue.

Cargo operators FedEx and UPS are also included in the data but have not hired pilots since at least February.

A Low Point

In September, 1,001 pilots were hired, per FAPA’s data, marking the second-lowest month of hiring so far in 2023. June 2023 reported the fewest hired pilots at 958. October 2023 saw a modest increase of 114 new hires when compared to September.

Both September and October 2023 fell below 2022 hiring trends during the same period. In comparison, U.S. airlines hired 1.105 and 1,243 pilots in 2022 for the respective months, representing 232 fewer year-over-year.

Despite the shifting trend, major U.S. carriers are still on track to eclipse 2022 pilot hiring numbers overall. FAPA’s data indicates that 11,050 pilots have been hired to date in 2023,

A Shifting Pilot Shortage?

In late October, ultra-low-cost carrier Spirit announced it would stop hiring pilots until further notice. The airline lost nearly $158 million in Q3 2023. Coinciding with this announcement, FAPA’s data shows a drop off in Spirit’s pilot hiring from August 2023.

While some carve-outs exist at airlines to hire direct-entry captains, the vast majority of hiring pertains to first officers. After gaining time and seniority at a carrier, first officers can later transition to the left seat. However, finding pilots interested in upgrading to captain has proven to be a challenge at some airlines.

“For a year now, at least for us, the issue has not been hiring pilots, and the issue has not been pilot attrition. So that’s not a concern. The issue has been on the upgrade front,” shared Sun Country president and chief financial officer Dave Davis during the company’s Q3 2023 earnings call. At Skift’s Aviation Forum in early November, the Minneapolis-based airline’s CEO Jude Bricker shared that his top-earning pilot made $750,000 in 2022.

Regional carriers are particularly not immune from retaining captains. “It’s actually a captain shortage. We don’t have a first officer shortage…we’re producing lots of ATP certificates across the country,” said CommuteAir CEO Rick Hoefling during an interview with AirlineGeeks.

On the cargo side, both FedEx and UPS have stopped hiring as of early 2023. Leadership at these carriers has even advised pilots currently on the payroll to look at other opportunities outside the company, including at regional carriers.

Some Positive Trends

Even with some reductions in overall hiring, a few airlines are still setting milestones. In October, Allegiant had its second-highest hiring month on record for 2023, bringing in 43 new pilots.

Also in October, United broke its own hiring record with 270 new pilots. This marks the largest hiring month for the carrier in 2022 and 2023. So far in 2023, United hired the most pilots of any major U.S. airline at 2,296.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on AirlineGeeks.com.

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As mentioned in my last video, virtually all airline pilots in the United States are unionized, and those who aren’t work under rather union-like conditions. Beyond the airlines, many of the larger fractional, charter, and cargo companies have also chosen to use seniority for the purposes of aircraft assignment, upgrade, and scheduling. 

So though there are some distinct downsides to the system, it is important to note that it remains in place primarily because pilots have consistently chosen it, both with their votes and their feet. This is not some Machiavellian plot imposed from above by nefarious union bosses or money-grubbing senior captains. For more than 70 years now, employers that choose to base pilot promotion and rostering on any standard but seniority quickly find themselves starved of pilot applicants and/or with a union voted onto the property. The market, it might be said, has spoken. 

The Power of the Seniority List

The basis of the system is the seniority list. All pilots at a particular company are permanently ranked according to their date of hire at that company. Pilots within the same new hire class are usually ordered by birth date, or occasionally by something more arbitrary such as social security number. One’s seniority number changes constantly as senior pilots retire and junior pilots are hired—or in bad times, as junior pilots are furloughed. When I was hired at my present company in 2014, I was the second-most junior pilot in my new hire class and was therefore something like #11654 out of 11655. As of this month, I am exactly #6600 out of 14152, or 47 percent. By looking at planned age-65 retirements, one can extrapolate seniority progression over time, and in fact pilots make great sport of this. 

Thanks to a website coded by an enterprising colleague, I can see that on my 50th birthday, 4/17/31, I am forecast to be seniority #2406 (20 percent) and ought to be able to hold Seattle A330 Captain. 

Yes, the very height of hubris— now excuse me, I’m off to pre-order my Maserati MC20!

Seniority is sacrosanct because it determines most everything about one’s professional life, which in this 24/7/365 industry is tantamount to personal life. First and foremost, work schedules are bid in strict seniority order, typically once a month. Today this is mostly done with a computer program known as Preferential Bidding System (PBS). The company builds a variety of trips and loads them into PBS where pilots can sift through them using various analytical tools. The program allows pilots to pick specific trips, or it can automatically build the most ideal schedule (or “line”) according to one’s preferences. As PBS moves down the list of pilots within a particular category (e.g., LAX E145 FOs), the pot of available trips shrinks, and the remaining pilots have less and less control over their schedule. About 60 percent of the way down the list, every remaining line holder will be forced to fly some or all weekends and all holidays. 

At some point the pot of trips is exhausted and the remaining pilots are forced to sit reserve—or perhaps it’s a slow month, and senior pilots wishing to stay home snag those reserve lines themselves. Senior pilots also get first dibs on choice vacation weeks and well-paid overtime flying. 

Movement between categories is normally governed by seniority as well. This might involve changing bases, changing aircraft, and/or moving between right seat and left. When the company needs additional pilots in a particular category or categories, they post a list of vacancies, which interested pilots bid in seniority order. Pilots leaving old categories create new vacancies, which the company may or may not backfill. The waterfall effect can create unexpected consequences and a great deal of training churn. Newly converted pilots are prohibited from bidding another category requiring training for a “seat lock” period that varies from six months to several years. The ultimate airline pilot nightmare is to mistakenly bid a category that leaves you ultra-junior, crushing your quality of life, and being seat locked and unable to do anything about it for two years. “Bid what you want and want what you bid,” say the wise old heads at my airline. 

The Trouble With the Seniority System

The widespread adoption of the seniority system has a few notable consequences. The one most surprising to outsiders is that promotion has no basis whatsoever in ability or merit. This is by design, and it’s a good thing. First, simply being hired and passing initial and recurrent training ensures a rather high threshold of ability. Secondly, merit in a corporate setting is typically measured through productivity, but a pilot’s No. 1 job is safety, and safety is often unproductive in the short term. Promotion and rostering systems based on any criteria other than seniority—still in use at some overseas airlines and small companies here—inevitably lead to cronyism and favoritism, and frequently a poisonous cockpit and safety culture. 

One major downside to the seniority system is that you start completely anew every time you are hired at a new company. This is incredibly strange to most workers outside of aviation, and indeed it seems counterproductive in a profession where experience is so important. For better or worse, the seniority system binds pilots to the health of their employers. During acrimonious contract talks we often hear the refrain from outsiders: “If it’s so bad there, why don’t you leave?” The seniority system can make doing so akin to career suicide. 

Seniority is also why airline mergers inevitably result in acrimonious squabbling between merged pilot groups, with the bitterness sometimes lasting for decades. This is especially true when merging two demographically different pilot groups, such as US Airways and America West in 2005, or when a stronger airline acquires a weaker airline, such as American buying TWA in 2001 (the majority of TWA pilots were “stapled” below AA pilots, with disastrous effect after 9/11). Today there is an accepted fairer methodology to combining seniority lists, but ill  will can still linger. 

Most notably for new professional pilots, seniority is what makes the right timing and advancement so critical to a piloting career. In times of rapid hiring, a year’s difference in seniority can have a massive effect on career progression, earnings, and quality of life. For many years, when turbine PIC time was a hard and fast requirement for being hired at a major airline, acquiring the seniority to upgrade to captain was a primary obsession for regional pilots. The current pilot shortage has brought other factors like pay and quality of life to the forefront, and right now it’s not uncommon for newer pilots to switch companies in fairly rapid succession in search of the best deals. 

There have been various utopian proposals for a national seniority list over the years, which would blunt most of the more negative aspects of the seniority system. It has all come to naught: management wants to retain control of hiring, young pilots want nothing to impede their advancement, and old pilots prefer the system they grew up with and know. It does seem to me that if we are ever to make that change—and start operating more like a guild than a loose association of pilot unions—there will likely never be another opportunity like the current pilot shortage. Alas, I do not expect any changes to be forthcoming, and the system as currently constituted is likely to be with us for a long time to come.

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The simple answer is, “No, I don’t miss the airline.” Most folks assume my response is because of COVID-19, inclusive of lunatic passengers, inconsistent schedules, and more. I don’t envy my colleagues, but virus protocols wouldn’t have dictated my early departure had I still been employed. The industry is not a stranger to turmoil, nor are we strangers to the resiliency required to perform the mission of safely flying people, regardless of distractions.

In the glamorous age of the ’60s, the airlines began to transition from complex propeller-driven airplanes to the sophistication and speed of the turbojet. Though the transition was a positive step in air travel, higher altitudes and significantly faster airplanes involved drastic changes for an evolving air traffic control system, growing airport terminals, airline operations, overall training, and pilot skill sets. Were older and more senior pilots capable of transitioning to jets? How would hourly pay be reformulated, now that it took less time to fly from New York to Chicago? In today’s environment the issues may be miniscule, but they created turmoil at the time.

Deregulation was introduced in 1978. Carriers scrambled to fly routes that weren’t accessible in the regulated environment, some biting off more than they could chew. Establishing profitable fares for these routes has become
an artful science of mysterious mathematics.

The turmoil of deregulation continued into the ’80s. Though new carriers attempted to enter the market—e.g., People Express—the casualties were big-name companies that failed to compete: Braniff, Pan Am, and Eastern. Bankruptcies were part of the equation. Furloughed pilots had the option of seeking employment with newer airlines, accepting a position at the bottom of another airline’s seniority list, or simply finding another career.

My former employer, American Airlines, weathered the storm by better defining its market. The company and the union agreed to implement the dreaded “B scale,” a permanent lower-tiered pay structure for new-hire pilots. Other airlines adopted their own versions. The incentive for pilots already on the payroll was rapid advancement.

The plan created a second class of pilots, however. The union felt the pressure of a potential revolt when the number of second-class pilots began to outnumber the others. The airline was becoming profitable with or without the lower pay scale. Within five years, the B scale had all but been eliminated…well, with some caveats.

I accepted the B scale, gambling that it would disappear. American had been my dream since I was 6 years old. However, I soon became despondent enough to consider resigning based on a divisive attitude from some incumbents who believed that “B-scalers” existed only because of the lower pay. They inferred we wouldn’t have been hired based on our own merits—hiring boom or not.

The challenge in the ’90s became the glut of carriers competing in over-saturated markets at high-density airports. On a blue-sky day, it was not uncommon at New York’s LaGuardia airport to crawl an inch at a time in a one-hour departure conga line. Additionally, in the same decade, a handful of accidents changed our way of doing business from loss-of-control training to deicing procedures, and terrain awareness operation.

And then, of course, 9/11 changed not only our threat procedures but our psyche. The old philosophy of simply cooperating with a hijacker vanished almost overnight—we were to fight for control of the cockpit at all costs. Airline pilots lobbied for guns in the cockpit. The Federal Flight Deck Officer (FFDO) program was created.

As the airlines attempted to recover from the financial effects of 9/11 and a self-induced market of inefficient, over-saturated frequency, Chapter 11 became the industry buzzword. Pay cuts were another solution. Pilots were furloughed. Retirement funds were decimated. Carrier consolidation became the next progression. The painful merging of seniority lists made no one happy.

Now comes COVID-19: Mask mandates. Drastic schedule reductions and irregularities. Restricted layover protocols. As for the federal vaccine mandate, contrary to the media’s focus, the issue is not “get the shot or get out,” but rather how a pilot is “accommodated,” if he or she is eligible for a medical or religious exemption. Additionally, pilots don’t react well to being forced into compliance. They need time to analyze. Some hold the concern that if an adverse long-term effect from the vaccine is discovered, will the carrier consider disability pay? For most carriers, an unpaid leave of absence is not an option—they need working employees. So, the solution could be in the form of regular testing for those with exemptions.

For me, the vaccine would be a no-brainer. It’s a mitigation of risk to protect passengers, crew, and fellow employees from a common enemy, just like the FFDO program in which I participated. Yes, the FFDO program was voluntary, but allowing a lethal weapon in the cockpit was mandatory, whether you were the one carrying or not. Initially, I thought the risk outweighed the threat, but I reconsidered when the program proved its worth.

So, why did I retire early? After 34 years, I had reached the pinnacle of my career. Something in my soul said it was time to go. I am truly fortunate that I could choose my own time to make that final retirement flight because so many of my colleagues had no idea they had actually flown their last trip.

Editor’s Note: This column originally appeared in the Q1 2022 issue of FLYING.

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