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Comment by bronco21016 | Hacker News Reader

Jobs at major airlines are high paying because of the high cost of time, effort, and dollars necessary to procure the skills necessary for the job. A new pilot can expect to spend at least $150,000-200,000 at a 4 year program largely due to the expense needed to gain those hours you mention that make him or her safer. Once that's done you'll spend at least a couple thousand hours working to get experience in low paying jobs like those explained in the article you linked. All of this experience is necessary to get those high paying jobs ($200,000+ within a few years) at a major carrier to make the pay off worth it.

The major airlines are paying high wages to attract the best, most experienced pilots in the world. There is definitely no rent-seeking in this employment market.

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> Jobs at major airlines are high paying because of the high cost of time, effort, and dollars necessary to procure the skills necessary for the job.

An ATP license for a major airline is no different than an ATP license for Bob's Discount Airlines, so the costs of obtaining either one are the same. Airlines (or in the US, their unions, who usually govern this) generally promote on seniority, which does relate to the number of hours flown, but considering it's the hours that are flown on the job, it's airline's investment at that point.

In reality, though, jobs at major airlines pay well for senior pilots because the unions for major airlines are run by senior pilots, who see no problem in negotiating a payscale with significant income inequality between junior and senior levels. I'd urge you to read Philip Greenspun's "Unions and Airlines" to understand the way the industry is structured in the US http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

> The major airlines are paying high wages to attract the best, most experienced pilots in the world.

If they were, senior pilots from United would be jumping ship for better compensation packages with Delta, and then American would have to raise the stakes to attract the best and the brightest. But a senior pilot at United will have to restart as a junior pilot with Delta, all that "high cost of time, effort, and dollars necessary to procure the skills" be damned.

> "But a senior pilot at United will have to restart as a junior pilot with Delta, all that "high cost of time, effort, and dollars necessary to procure the skills" be damned."

That doesn't make any sense at all. That sounds like some sort of anti-trust issue that keeps airline costs low by making it impossible to "poach" highly qualified pilots from other carriers and raise wages.

Seniority rules are written by unions, not airlines. From airline management point of view, they have a fixed liability (number of pilot man-hours) and a fixed resource (pool of money to pay for those man-hours). How that fixed resource is applied to the fixed liability is up to the union.

To quote a letter to the editor in 2003 WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB105149633146672400

"A 45-year-old captain who has been with an airline for 15 years cannot quit and go elsewhere, because doing so would mean starting all over at the bottom, earning $25,000 a year at a new airline and working every holiday. Imagine if a surgeon had to go back to being an intern every time he changed hospitals."

It's exploitable somewhat by airline management (definitely takes the metaphor of golden handcuffs to the next level), but then the number of airlines is not fixed, with new start-ups coming on board every few years or so, so you'd think that at least someone would exploit these inefficiencies, if it made economic sense for them.

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