Pilots in the United States are currently in incredibly high demand, and at major airlines, pilots have been able to secure huge pay raises. Unfortunately that’s not the case across the board, though. At Southern Airways Express, pilots have been paid as little as $12 per hour, and have been sued when they quit. This…
Continue reading: Southern Airways Express Suing Pilots Who Quit, And It’s Messy
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Read the contract and don't sign when it's not right! You said it yourself, typically new pilots gain hours as flight instructors. Still but cheap but definitely less risky than this! My son is in pilot training and will instruct through his school when he gets to that point
Exploited? come on. They knew what they were getting in to, theyand freely entered into the legally binding agreement because it served their needs as well. Now suddenly they have an opportunity that pays much more due to pilot shortage, and they want to bail. $20k should be a drop in the bucket. Live up to your obligations, pay what you owe, and go become another overpaid union brat.
Indentured servitude went out with the US Constitution.
Telling minimum-wage employees to risk their lives and the lives of their passengers is NOT an internship, Mr. Little.
And suing ex-pilots you exploited (as part of what seems to be a corporate strategy) is a very bad look. It will be interesting to see what the courts decide in these cases.
It's unclear in this report if all these lawsuits have come at once, fairly recently, or if they've happened over time, and perhaps some have been settled/adjudicated/resolved. Have any of these pilots successfully defended themselves against these actions?
It's a shame. I love using them out of PIT. I can go from PIT to Lancaster in an hour and snag fares from $35 each way (4.5 hr drive, $25 in tolls and $50 for gas if driven). This is an eye opener and I hope many of the awesome pilots I've met don't end up having to pay up
If the pilots can prove substandard contract standards and safety conditions they will win...and FAA willl need to get involved.
Otherwise the contract wins.
But given pilot shortage, it's a sorry state that they signed the contract.
There are several serious issues here. The obvious one is pilots desperate to gain hours/experience and exploitation by a company who relies on a continuous flow of new, forward looking pilots that who if they can afford to eat and have shelter for one year will be gone on day 366. Between these two competing forces are a host of other issues. Nothing mentioned about the emotions toll this takes on the pilots and the impact it may have on complex problem solving and decision making. What if one day a trouble pilot may just point the nose downward or a lack of experience and a crappy company, a preventable incident occurs. Now imagine a regular flier reads this and now understands your flying with a cavalier company who seems to put revenues ahead of everything else. Where does that leave you? Why not pay a living wage and build some kind of loyalty, even if limited. Maybe then you can get at least 13 months out of your ‘labor’ force.
If they aren’t comfortable signing a contract then they should go be a free agent CFI/I.
The title of this post look bad on Southern, but now it makes the pilots look bad after reading.
This reminds me of the sub-minimum wage Subway Sandwich Artist “apprenticeship” in the UK.
Legal? Yes. Unethical? Absolutely.
Paying $12/hr for the responsibilities of a pilot is absolutely exploitation.
Of all the numbers cited here, $55/hour seems right for a pilot, on absolute terms given their “skill.” Certainly not minimum wage but also not 100’s of thousands per year.
Slavery continued with the US Constitution, as did indentured servants, until the 13th Amendment after the Civil War. But these are small-claims cases, which might be brought in justice courts before judges who don't have the benefit of law school. A more interesting detail would be where the company chooses to file -- in Palm Beach, which may be thousands of miles away from where the pilots are now located?
I'm not sure you know what involuntary means. They signed contracts. I suppose it's possible they signed under duress, in which case they could void the contract.
That's not to say this is necessarily an acceptable situation, but there's also nothing inherently wrong with employment contracts requiring the employee to work for a certain period of time or otherwise repay training costs, assuming the training actually cost the employer money and benefited the employee beyond his term at the particular employer.
$55/hour for a pilot comes out to about $50k per year. Do you really believe that’s all a pilot is worth?
An electrician recently wanted $650 to spend 30 minutes installing a new bathroom fan in my house. A landscaper wanted $1500 to remove a tree from my front yard.
After a decade and a half of experience flying aircraft, years of flight training and experience building, college, a masters degree and 100s of thousands of dollars on education and training costs, I believe I am worth a little more than what you seem to believe.
Pilots get paid for what they know how to do, not what they do on the normal day to day. Do you believe your family practice physician deserves to get paid what they do for seeing you once a year, checking your vital signs, answering some questions, and reviewing some lab work? Seems like a pretty simple task that anyone with a little training can do, right? But they get paid for so much more because of their knowledge and expertise when that normal annual physical becomes not so normal.
Pilots get paid what the market will bear and an airline pilot has historically been a high paying job. Even with the new round of contracts that you’re seeing, top salaries still haven’t hit historical norms when accounting for inflation. It’s also worth nothing that the salaries you speak of are top salaries and many pilots will never see it. “Experience” isn’t a negotiating card in respect to pay. It a pilots airline goes belly up or they voluntarily change jobs, they are back to making the lowest pay at their new shop.
Make no mistake, the fast hiring and “pilot shortage” of today will slow, and it will once again become a very difficult career to enter with lots of competition. My first flying job ever paid 12k/year. I have friends who were literally homeless trying to make it in the industry. It’s easy to look down on pilots and the pay when you look at current times. It wasn’t so easy just a short time ago.
These contracts are common in other fields that require lots of training. I know that our local public transit company - there government employees- you have to pay back the cost of you CDL training if you don't stay for at least 6 months
Scientology has people sign a million year contract and this seems as one-sided as that.
I want to feel sorry for the pilots, but I really don't. Except for the one who was bait-and-switched, all of them knew what they were getting into. One year does not strike me as a particularly onerous or uncommon service requirement as part of a labor contract. That said, even interns are legal employees, subject to FLSA / minimum wage laws. At rates of $12 per flight hour, I'd be surprised if there is actually that much "excess" pay to seize beyond minimum wage.
Did any of the pilots pick up the phone and use the FAA's anonymous reporting line to report violations?
No. I didn't think so.
They're all young enough to be full of this "I don't feel safe" crap they got in high school, and young enough that committments don't matter.
To be making $50k a year at $55/hour, that means a pilot only works about 900 payable hours per year? I was thinking about $100k per year is a fair salary for a pilot. It sounds like you have quite a bit of education, but people can become a commercial pilot without a college degree. Also understand the cost & time of the dubious 1,500 flight hour requirement, but the $100k cost and time I've read about is less than 4 years of most public colleges. I understand the on-the-job training aspect, but even plumbers have to go through 5 years of apprenticeship. As for the doctor analogy, couldn't that be said of almost all professions? And there's the same wide variation in competence depending on individual. The electrician and the landscaper analogy is more akin to comparison with airline, a business that takes revenue and pays employees down the line as well as that many others costs of running a business, not an employee like yourself. Most individual electrician/landscaper her/himself makes less than $55/hour.
The 1500 hour rule was implemented after inexperienced pilots killed dozens in a fatal crash in the Pacific Northwest. Since then the safety record has been stellar. The only people who want to change the 1500 hr rule are those that don’t value safety , or airlines that want to save money. The author is ignorant and shouldn’t be writing these articles. Sounds like all he cares about is cheap tickets. There isn’t a pilot shortage, there is a shortage of airlines willing to pay properly for trained experienced pilots and therefore can’t attract pilots to fly their planes.
I suspect Exit Row meant *indentured* servitude, not involuntary, and I agree it does sound like an end run around the illegality of that.
Those pilots had over 1500 hundred hours. They were not inexperienced. Please research before you say things you know nothing about.
Ahhhh...no. FAA Part 135 regulations limit flight hours to 1,200 annually. Even if the pilots were able to fly that many hours then the pay would be $66,000. The reality is that they aren't able to fly that much and would be lucky to get 800-1000 hours a year.
European carriers do not have the same safety record as the US does. Starting with the Air France accident (pilot error) to German Wings to the 737 carrier that ignored a pressurization problem to both Max crashes (both with significant pilot error), while the US hasn’t had a major crash in over a decade. Do your homework before you write something. Also understanding the difference between a training contract (illegal) and a promissory note for a type rating (legal) would be helpful to include.
And yet after the 1,500 hour rule we’ve had the safest era in US aviation. You ever fly as a CA with a 300 hour total time FO in a jet? If not you don’t have the right to opine on the subject.
The what you have achieved has no bearing on your market value. It's only your value as is perceived by someone will to pay you that matters.