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Comment by hindsightbias | Hacker News Reader

When your basic right seater needs a minimum of 1500 hours flight time, maybe your career path should include a salary higher than a union bus driver.

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Yeah, they make way more than any bus driver.

“An Alaska Airlines captain, according to a news release from the airline, averages about $341,000 a year, but pilots say it’s not just about money“

https://www.alaskasnewssource.com/2022/04/04/cancellations-c...

FWIW I just traveled on 4 flights with Alaska Air and this didn’t impact us at all.

Right seat != left seat. Check salary of first officers.

According to Glassdoor it's a little over $100k. [1]

I don't know what union bus drivers earn, but probably less than that? Median income is about $44k. It seems like a decent salary.

[1]: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Alaska-Airlines-First-Offic...

A Metro (Seattle) bus driver can easily earn $100k, but the range is crazily from $15k to $130K/year, assuming the upper end is someone in it for awhile working full time, and the lower end is very part time.

What is the difference in probability of achieving that pay? And difference in opportunity cost (debt, time, and effort)?

Without this information, an explicit comparison is impossible.

it's not, because you're looking at major carriers, which no one with the minimum 1500 hours will get a job at.

Airlines in America are traditionally extremely capital intensive, and the customers are very price sensitive. (e.g. "If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.") The low salary and unfavorable hours pilots face really originate at the customer level, with most people being unwilling to pay higher ticket prices. It's easy to blame airlines here, but that's a mental shortcut that doesn't represent the truth.

Would Airlines be so capital intensive if not for the security theatre of the TSA and all its related expenses?

Yes. TSA security theater is all paid for with a specific line item on your ticket. It is not that expensive:

> The fee is currently $5.60 per one-way trip in air transportation that originates at an airport in the U.S., except that the fee imposed per round trip shall not exceed $11.20

The rest is covered by tax payers, not airliners specifically.

https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/testimony/2020/03/03/examinin...

Yes. During COVID multiple airlines either almost went bankrupt or suffered huge losses because most of the cost of flying is depreciation of the airplanes themselves. That's why even though the US govt paid for airline employees' wages and fuel costs were 0 because no one was flying during COVID, airlines still suffered big losses.

Pilots at the majors earn 200k-500k. There's evidence of some pilots hitting seven figures. How much does a bus driver make?

Pilots not flying major routes for major airlines make less, in some cases a lot less ($30-40k a year).

Note most of those pilots will be on Horizon, not Alaska.

How is this information relevant on a discussion about a pilot shortage affecting a major carrier?

In the same way that you don't get to be a principal engineer at Google on your first day out of college, you don't get to be a captain on your first day out of flight school.

But the pay and working conditions for new pilots is rather worse than it is for new programmers.

Yeah, people should think of this like "what if Google engineers started at $45k salaries instead of $120k+?" They could work for years to get up to that same $300k+ level but they're starting much lower and expected to just take it (and the ultra high mountain view/SF cost of living).

That’s half of it. To get the full pilot experience add “and what if when senior Google engineers left for Apple or Microsoft or Facebook they had to start as junior engineers again at junior pay and could only be promoted back up after the junior engineers already there were promoted?”

Lots of people leave the profession before becoming pilots at a major carrier.

Right seat is the first officer / copilot. Not the pilot. You must spend a long time as a copilot before advancing to the pilot role.

You will earn nothing. And you will be happy.

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