is Southwestern Air really independent when the largest shareholder is DHL, and DHL owns and leases the planes to Southwestern?
Even if you can claim the board or management of Southwestern is "independent" what, exactly, can they do? all their inputs are literally owned by DHL.
Why not allow foreign airlines to fly domestic US routes? DHL would buy the other 51% and make the ownership clear. They only have to use these vague relationships because of US regulation that tries to protect domestic players.
I wish there was a little bit more detail on what laws are bypassed. Unfortunately I'm also a little put off by the emphasise on averting foreign influence. Regulations against foreign carriers operating in the US were always uncomfortable to me.
Because you don't want to experience a bug in the automatic flight while the 777 is above a major city.
Self driving cars will come soon, self driving planes won't come for decades. The risk of losing >1000 lives because of one bug or hack doesn't justify the cost savings.
There aren't really any facts here just pure emotion that you would hear in any industry where costs are cut. I've no idea how fairly these pilots are paid. But surely there are regulations about pilot rest just like on commercial flights. And a pilot cannot really pull heart strings about being away from home when they chose that line of work where your job is literally to be away from home all the time.
I think transportation is an incredibly important (food!), but the way this is written seems incredibly tone-deaf. He should have focused on the facts (if there are any) about incident rates and length of time flying, instead of saying how his dream of connecting "our great country with the rest of the world" is being jeopardized.
"The essential characteristic of the Argument from Intimidation is its appeal to moral self-doubt and its reliance on the fear, guilt or ignorance of the victim. It is used in the form of an ultimatum demanding that the victim renounce a given idea without discussion, under threat of being considered morally unworthy. The pattern is always: “Only those who are evil (dishonest, heartless, insensitive, ignorant, etc.) can hold such an idea.”"
etherael doesn't appear to be supporting the logical clout of that type of argument, but rather commenting on its ubiquity in modern public discourse and success in driving policy.
E.g., "think of the children," "if we don't X, the terrorists win," or "we must censor the Internet or undermine crypto, because it enables Y."
> Normal people don't connect with or understand facts.
I consider myself and, almost by definition, most of the people I know to be normal and I can assure you us plebians are perfectly capable of understanding facts.
The nature of commercial flying is such that actual incidents are pretty rare (150 or so a year recently[1]), and very very expensive. So taking the "data-driven" approach to pushing what's safe really isn't economically feasible, to say nothing of the ethics issues. Instead the principle of "if it seems unsafe, it's probably unsafe" applies. I believe the situation mentioned in the article of riding for fourteen hours then flying for nine is allowed by the FAA, but if the pilots aren't rested (reasonable after riding in a cargo plane for a day), then the airline shouldn't be asking them to fly.
A crash of a cargo jet (eg. converted airliner approx. $40m value) is such a rare event that "bean counters" can justify a certain level of risk.
A good comparison is SpaceX Falcon[0] or Orbital Sciences Antares launch vehicles. If they have a mishap, there is high probability that it'll take 6mo+ to return to flight. There is a significant cost to that ($300m+ cost to SpaceX, for vehicle replacement and compensation for delays). If UPS crashes a jet due to pilot fatigue[1] and nobody on the ground is hurt, the airline will continue flying with minimal interruption.
There have been issues with Fatigue causing accidents at both UPS[1] and FedEx[2]. If a cargo jet crashes but doesn't cause ground fatalities, the general public forgets fast. The UPS Airbus A300 crashed in Birmingham, AL with 'only' two crew fatalities. A passenger A300 would likely have resulted in many more fatalities.
Turkish Airlines had a cargo 747 crash[3] in Kyrgyzstan, killing 4 crew and 35 people in the village that it crashed into. This involved a contract operator, and received minimal attention in the world media.
In aviation there is a tendency towards "regulate by tombstone"[4] When an El Al 747 crashed shortly after takeoff in Amsterdam and killed 39 in an apartment complex, along with 4 crew, It was a huge story in the European media.[5] 747s were inspected, repaired and upgraded to prevent a recurrence.
Cargo airlines do a lot of "back of the clock" or overnight flying, which is considerably risky from a fatigue point of view. I'm actually amazed that more accidents haven't happened.
Someone needs to quantify the cost for various level of risks. If the air cargo industry could save an average of 1 live per year at the cost of $1B a year in additional costs to pass to it's customers, should it?
Industry costs magically cut while Bezos is almost the richest person on the planet. And Amazon is a behemoth doing incredibly well. Very competitive industry. Costs must be cut. Let's talk about the metrics. Employees live to work, if they are not working what's the point on their existence? /s To me all of this points to the need for unions to return. Without the threat of communism there is nothing to keep this class of people from abusing workers, just to show the world they are not just about money, and creating good working conditions and good jobs. To them it's like a game, like a simulation, an RTS, the people don't matter. Their lives don't matter. Only thing that matters is the bottom line. I personally prefer Bezos was a mere millionaire, his company wasn't doing that well, and that his workers had relatively good jobs. How about you?
Well actually most of Bezos's wealth is in Amazon stock. Which he has to sell to make money. Its really not your gold-bricks-in-basement-vault money. Most of which he won't be selling till he dies. And that will go into some trust which will be owned by his descendants as inheritance.
The real thing about communism or capitalism isn't much about the merit of the idea in itself.
The quality of the political system that implements these ideas, efficiency of execution matters.
Amazon is making life difficult for the USPS as well...forced them to work on Sundays. They definitely have leverage.
That said, most everyone at USPS is probably quite happy that Amazon is helping their business thrive when it had been floundering for years. USPS folks are also not working marathon hours like these pilots, except at Christmas, but they've been doing that for decades.
The dividing line in jobs nowadays seems to be headquarters or operations, brain or hands. If you're in operations, you are already or will be optimized to the extent possible and permitted. Not pretty, but the modus operandi.
Pilots are part of operations and not different to drivers or cleaning staff, even if they still consider themselves part of an elite.
Thank you for putting it into clear words. Seems like these things are more visible when the nice headquarter jobs exist in a different country. Guess how almost all countries where Amazon operates (all but one?) think about the qualities of Amazon as an employer...
> For example, my colleagues and I have been asked to sit on 14-hour flights from the UW to the Middle East, only to then fly the same aircraft to Asia on another nine-hour journey
Which is a lot to __ask__ for. Wasn't the company willing to pay overtime wages?
I'm not a pilot, but to me it sounds like that's a pretty much unavoidable issue in the industry and the pilots are compensated heavily for this overtime, aren't they?
Hot topic in The Netherlands right now is the threat of a hostile takeover of Akzo Nobel, a chemical company with 50,000 employees, by a US company. The government is discussing putting the same protective regulations in place that Trump is threatening with. The US isn't "losing" jobs to Germany, they are trade partners. If Americans want to stop trading then both sides lose.
I thought that with all the safety regulations, cargo pilots were doing more or less the same number of hours that passengers pilots. In fact I read previously that pay was now pretty much aligned between the two, and that this previously unpopular profession among pilots was attracting increasing interest.
Yesss, evil nazis taking over the country. I don't see the point of the article. Automated work and cheaper labour is searched everywhere to produce more profit. Only way for people to survive in this race is to develop themselves, educate, learn, specialize, make more value. Not to build walls.
* Hour restrictions for passenger transport are significantly more stringent than for freight.
* Southern Air's fleet consists 737s and 777s -- not small planes.
* These plans have to fly over and into major metropolitan areas.
* Many parts of flying can be automated, but in the end, and for aircraft this size, you probably want a human operator in the plane for the sheer reason that they are better equipped to handle unplanned emergencies.
It's a tough call whether flying freight or regional airlines pays worse -- but in either case, you're anywhere from a quarter to half of what a software engineer of similar years experience in the bay area would make. The hours are in a lot of ways worse -- mostly because you're away from home a lot of the time, and you have really limited control of your schedule. (As someone who's worked as an on-call engineer for ten years, and who also flies, I'd take the on-call responsibilities over flying freight any day of the week.)
I'd agree that the article lacks for details. But, a relatively quick reading through things like airliners.net will give you an idea of the kind of hours and pay these guys typically work -- it's not an easy job. If we care about their safety -- and our own, given the number of freight aircraft flying over us every night -- we shouldn't write them off as just asking for money they don't deserve.
I think most people will agree that the $200k+ starting salary in the bay area is an anomaly. Everyone is doing everything to "fix" this problem.
If we care about safety, we prohibit them from doing things that are unsafe. If management tries to make them do things that are prohibited, we should make it easy for people to say no without repercussions.
You're right. But as always in history, these changes can't come by asking companies nicely. You either need a strong union that is willing to strike (and Southern actually has one) and/or federal regulators.
Why are hour restrictions different for freight than passenger? Adapting this would probably already change much. And a strike at Prime Air for a few weeks during holiday season should also help improving conditions.
Particularly ironic inversion since DHL was formed as a US company to fly bills of lading between San Francisco and Honolulu. Initially they used spare capacity in air passengers' baggage so that the bills would arrive ahead of the actual cargo on ships.
Eventually moved upstream into moving the cargo itself.
The health insurance system is corrupt and medical services are arguably on the decline.
When you don't have money or a job, you can get basic benefits and in return get treated like a dog. For many people that is still better than in their home countries, so they come here.
The middle class is getting smaller, because they're the ones paying for all this.
Is milking the middle class from all ends socialist? Doesn't feel like it.
If you're from Germany, go to a US hospital once to get a basic treatment. Then look at the bill and think about the argument of a corrupt insurance system. Because as a German, you'll likely never have seen how much a doctor or hospital actually charge a patient.
Yes, the problem isn't Germany's companies; the problem is the lax regulation and weak unions in the US. Both foreign and domestic companies frequently mistreat their employees in the US.
Maybe tax cuts to corporations would help. If a company that was previously keeping 65% of profits started keeping 85% due to lower taxes perhaps they would invest some of that in employee pay / benefits / more employees. Of course, they also have the choice to just keep the extra money for themselves.
Ha ha hilarious. You don't think they'll just pay larger C-suite salaries?
The question you should ask is: who has the power in this relationship? If the pilots unionized properly, they'd have the power to demand higher wages or better conditions.
hasn't enough been written, using historical numbers and factual mathematics, that plainly shows this idea of "trickle down economics" is depressingly incorrect?
Unions sound nice in theory. But in practice, pilot unions work only for very senior pilots [1]. All other pilots in the union get paid much less and have worse working conditions. The detailed story about the effects of pilot unions:
[1]: Senior vs junior pilots gap is also the incentive for the airline owner to go bancrupt and start a new airline. So that there'll no senior pilots in the airline.
Company Propaganda writers unionize. Do no longer produce lengthy treaties about how unions destroy companys and are bad for workers, in a infinite race to the bottom against your fellow sellouts. Do no longer pay for the paint needed to hide the facts that lots of other country (VW- Germany for example) have unions who run cooperations together with shareholders. Raise your flag, and together future flags may not be raised, for cheap!
Unions are run by senior pilots; it's very much in their interests for pay to continue to be weighted towards senior pilots (and they could trot out plenty of justifications related to experience and training for it if they wanted to)
Junior pilots aim to become senior pilots when they've accumulated enough experience so it's generally not in their interest to rock the boat
"The answer is to look at who controls the pilot's union: very senior pilots. The airline management is mostly interested in what percentage of its revenues are paid out to pilots; the distribution of the money among the pilots does not affect profitability. The very senior pilots on the other side of the table say "We need the most senior pilots to get $300,000 in pay and benefits." The airline's response is "The only way that could work is if we pay the new pilots $16,000 per year." The group of senior pilots responds "We can live with that."
Note that being classified as "junior" or "senior" has nothing to do with flying skills or experience. If Captain Sully were to start work today at a regional airline, he would earn between $16,000 and $20,000 per year, depending on the carrier, and fly as first officer. He was "senior" at US Airways, but is "junior" at the new carrier."
TL;DR
"DHL HELL" from the subject means DHL is paying not as much as the author of the article, a pilot, would like. DHL has a lever over pilots, and pay decreases. My assumption would be that the building of the US war machine after 2001 increased the number of veteran pilots, increasing the trend over the last several decades of too many pilots.
Love how Americans put "great country" into every other sentence.
I assume Trump voters [author is veteran and highly probably voted for Trump] like free markets as long as it decreases prices for them as consumers, when it comes to their jobs they are socialists.
Also interesting the sprinkling of conspiracy theories "And most disturbing—it is becoming increasingly clear that DHL is trying to pull the strings from behind the scenes, using a complex web of ties to our industry to bypass legal checks against foreign influence [...]" - most probably because the US is the best nation in the world, so a foreign company can't act like this, so they "bypass legal checks against foreign influence [...]".
The author works for "Southern Air", a US company, btw.
This isn't the first time we've heard first-hand accounts of massive companies treating workers like slaves. Amazon is already notorious for the ways it treats its warehouse workers. Once again, upward concentration of wealth in our country has created pressure on the people at the bottom to produce more, more, more. If you don't see the parallels to the time period leading up to the massive workers' rights reforms of the Progressive era - you aren't looking very hard. We seem to have have already forgotten the lessons we learned just a century or so ago.
There's a very big difference between a cargo pilot and an Amazon warehouse worker. Just because both feel treated unfairly, the warehouse worker will be much worse off. Cargo pilots dream of salaries that were usual in the past, warehouse workers just want to earn enough to have an acceptable lifestyle.
DHL is doing the same with their workers in Germany (so it's not because Germany has more loose regulations on their workers, I think they are even more strict in maximum hours work time in comparison even to USA). The problem is that this big logistic companies like DHL and Amazon trying to max. their profit and min. their losses without any ethics and with pressure from competitors on the shoulders of their most important employees. Logistic is going mad and it should be better regulated world wide. A lot of people in logistics and postal service are frustrated because of this online trade trend nowadays.
There will have been 3 pilots on board. One can always rest so that you don't get over the maximum time. 23 hours is still at the limit of what you can do with 3 pilots. For passenger planes, you would've probably needed 4 pilots.
> At another DHL carrier, pilots went on strike for two days after a year of regularly being forced to cover overtime shifts due to short-staffing.
Sounds like they need to do more of that.
Is there a surplus of pilots waiting in line for jobs? This isn't the first time I've heard that pilots get paid very little and have to work incredibly long hours. Are there no unions?
I'd like them to define "forced", I don't think there really is any mechanism for an employer to compel anyone to do things.
People learn to fly because they like flying, it is fun. Because people like to fly, the going rate for piloting is low. If people didn't like flying so much, the rates would be higher.
Pilot pay varies widely depending on airline, seniority and rank. The big gap is between the regionals (low to mid five figures) and the major carriers (six figures).
Depends on the airline. Pilots of major legacy carriers (and not their low-cost spin-offs) are typically really well paid (sometimes excessively so). In Germany I'm aware of cases of >500k$ annually for end-of-their-career pilots. I believe the situation in the US is similar. However, pilots of low-cost carriers earn significantly less. In Europe I heard of salaries in the range of 50k$ annually. I would guess cargo carriers that are not 100% subsidiaries of legacy carriers are closer to low-cost carriers in their salaries
At very low wage levels, near the subsistence level, the supply curve may also be curved backwards for a completely different reason. That effect creates an "inverted S" or "backward S" shape: a tail is added at the bottom of the labour-supply curve shown in the graph above with the quantity of labour-time supplied falling as wages rise. Then, because families face some minimum level of income needed to meet their subsistence requirements, lowering wages increases the amount of labour-time offered for sale. Similarly, a rise in wages can cause a decrease in the amount of labour-time offered for sale, and individuals take advantage of the higher wage to spend time on needed self- or family-maintenance activities. [3] [4]
There's certainly a mechanism by which an industry can compel its workers not to leave the industry - the cost of retraining. Most countries front-load training for jobs into 2-5 years near the beginning of people's adult lives putting them into debt - but they're often not able to retrain later on, due to debts (remaining loans from the first time, a mortgage, a car, etc) and responsibilities (often having a family). I don't know anyone with a family who could realistically spend a couple of years working part-time so they could free up the time to go to college again.
163 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadWhile they undoubtedly contribute, putting all the blame on their shoulders seems a bit silly.
Even if you can claim the board or management of Southwestern is "independent" what, exactly, can they do? all their inputs are literally owned by DHL.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2014/01/05/ell...
While the military argument may be used by some, to me, this is pretty clearly an economic treaty issue rather than a matter of national security.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Convention_on_Internat...
Why do cargo planes even need pilots? He isn't likely to get more money - instead his job is likely to be automated away.
Self driving cars will come soon, self driving planes won't come for decades. The risk of losing >1000 lives because of one bug or hack doesn't justify the cost savings.
I think this might be a case of content audience mismatch.
E.g., "think of the children," "if we don't X, the terrorists win," or "we must censor the Internet or undermine crypto, because it enables Y."
I consider myself and, almost by definition, most of the people I know to be normal and I can assure you us plebians are perfectly capable of understanding facts.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...
A good comparison is SpaceX Falcon[0] or Orbital Sciences Antares launch vehicles. If they have a mishap, there is high probability that it'll take 6mo+ to return to flight. There is a significant cost to that ($300m+ cost to SpaceX, for vehicle replacement and compensation for delays). If UPS crashes a jet due to pilot fatigue[1] and nobody on the ground is hurt, the airline will continue flying with minimal interruption.
There have been issues with Fatigue causing accidents at both UPS[1] and FedEx[2]. If a cargo jet crashes but doesn't cause ground fatalities, the general public forgets fast. The UPS Airbus A300 crashed in Birmingham, AL with 'only' two crew fatalities. A passenger A300 would likely have resulted in many more fatalities.
Turkish Airlines had a cargo 747 crash[3] in Kyrgyzstan, killing 4 crew and 35 people in the village that it crashed into. This involved a contract operator, and received minimal attention in the world media.
In aviation there is a tendency towards "regulate by tombstone"[4] When an El Al 747 crashed shortly after takeoff in Amsterdam and killed 39 in an apartment complex, along with 4 crew, It was a huge story in the European media.[5] 747s were inspected, repaired and upgraded to prevent a recurrence.
Cargo airlines do a lot of "back of the clock" or overnight flying, which is considerably risky from a fatigue point of view. I'm actually amazed that more accidents haven't happened.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos-6
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_1354
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Express_Flight_80
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_6491
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tombstone_mentality
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862
PS. I had a fatigue related car accident in flight school. The "symptoms" can sneak up on a pilot and quickly become an extreme hazard.
The real thing about communism or capitalism isn't much about the merit of the idea in itself.
The quality of the political system that implements these ideas, efficiency of execution matters.
That said, most everyone at USPS is probably quite happy that Amazon is helping their business thrive when it had been floundering for years. USPS folks are also not working marathon hours like these pilots, except at Christmas, but they've been doing that for decades.
Pilots are part of operations and not different to drivers or cleaning staff, even if they still consider themselves part of an elite.
> For example, my colleagues and I have been asked to sit on 14-hour flights from the UW to the Middle East, only to then fly the same aircraft to Asia on another nine-hour journey
Which is a lot to __ask__ for. Wasn't the company willing to pay overtime wages? I'm not a pilot, but to me it sounds like that's a pretty much unavoidable issue in the industry and the pilots are compensated heavily for this overtime, aren't they?
"US patriots, protect our labour achievements from this evil German company!"
* Hour restrictions for passenger transport are significantly more stringent than for freight.
* Southern Air's fleet consists 737s and 777s -- not small planes.
* These plans have to fly over and into major metropolitan areas.
* Many parts of flying can be automated, but in the end, and for aircraft this size, you probably want a human operator in the plane for the sheer reason that they are better equipped to handle unplanned emergencies.
It's a tough call whether flying freight or regional airlines pays worse -- but in either case, you're anywhere from a quarter to half of what a software engineer of similar years experience in the bay area would make. The hours are in a lot of ways worse -- mostly because you're away from home a lot of the time, and you have really limited control of your schedule. (As someone who's worked as an on-call engineer for ten years, and who also flies, I'd take the on-call responsibilities over flying freight any day of the week.)
I'd agree that the article lacks for details. But, a relatively quick reading through things like airliners.net will give you an idea of the kind of hours and pay these guys typically work -- it's not an easy job. If we care about their safety -- and our own, given the number of freight aircraft flying over us every night -- we shouldn't write them off as just asking for money they don't deserve.
If we care about safety, we prohibit them from doing things that are unsafe. If management tries to make them do things that are prohibited, we should make it easy for people to say no without repercussions.
Why are hour restrictions different for freight than passenger? Adapting this would probably already change much. And a strike at Prime Air for a few weeks during holiday season should also help improving conditions.
Eventually moved upstream into moving the cargo itself.
DHL == Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn
The health insurance system is corrupt and medical services are arguably on the decline.
When you don't have money or a job, you can get basic benefits and in return get treated like a dog. For many people that is still better than in their home countries, so they come here.
The middle class is getting smaller, because they're the ones paying for all this.
Is milking the middle class from all ends socialist? Doesn't feel like it.
The question you should ask is: who has the power in this relationship? If the pilots unionized properly, they'd have the power to demand higher wages or better conditions.
http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines
[1]: Senior vs junior pilots gap is also the incentive for the airline owner to go bancrupt and start a new airline. So that there'll no senior pilots in the airline.
Then bargain for different terms and conditions for junior pilots? There is no "one" way that unions work.
"The answer is to look at who controls the pilot's union: very senior pilots. The airline management is mostly interested in what percentage of its revenues are paid out to pilots; the distribution of the money among the pilots does not affect profitability. The very senior pilots on the other side of the table say "We need the most senior pilots to get $300,000 in pay and benefits." The airline's response is "The only way that could work is if we pay the new pilots $16,000 per year." The group of senior pilots responds "We can live with that."
Note that being classified as "junior" or "senior" has nothing to do with flying skills or experience. If Captain Sully were to start work today at a regional airline, he would earn between $16,000 and $20,000 per year, depending on the carrier, and fly as first officer. He was "senior" at US Airways, but is "junior" at the new carrier."
Love how Americans put "great country" into every other sentence.
I assume Trump voters [author is veteran and highly probably voted for Trump] like free markets as long as it decreases prices for them as consumers, when it comes to their jobs they are socialists.
Also interesting the sprinkling of conspiracy theories "And most disturbing—it is becoming increasingly clear that DHL is trying to pull the strings from behind the scenes, using a complex web of ties to our industry to bypass legal checks against foreign influence [...]" - most probably because the US is the best nation in the world, so a foreign company can't act like this, so they "bypass legal checks against foreign influence [...]".
The author works for "Southern Air", a US company, btw.
How often are they asked to take the marathon flights?
More details would be helpful...it's not clear if this is a new norm from the article.
Sounds like they need to do more of that.
Is there a surplus of pilots waiting in line for jobs? This isn't the first time I've heard that pilots get paid very little and have to work incredibly long hours. Are there no unions?
People learn to fly because they like flying, it is fun. Because people like to fly, the going rate for piloting is low. If people didn't like flying so much, the rates would be higher.
http://pilotjobs.atpflightschool.com/2015/01/23/how-much-mon...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curv...