February 9, 2024

So, earlier this week the U.S. Senate’s Commerce Committee shot down the move to increase the mandatory retirement age from 65 to 67. The measure lost by a single vote. Lawmakers succumbed to pressure from the Air Line Pilots Association, which spent months lobbying against the change.

The matter now goes to committee and there’s still a shot it could pass. But I wouldn’t count on it.

ALPA opposed the measure, but many of its constituents, including myself, did not. The union spun the whole thing as a safety issue, and warned of air travel becoming more “complicated” if it went through. The simpler truth is that ALPA has grown beholden to its younger members, who now comprise most of its membership, and who see raising the retirement age as an impediment to their career progression.

Which technically it would be, resulting in slower attrition, fewer upgrades and all that. But it’d be a small one. And these pilots too would have the opportunity to work an extra couple of years at the finale of their tenures, if they so choose.

For older hands like me, there’s resentment. Resentment because the luck and good fortune enjoyed by the newest generation of pilots cannot be overstated.

Entry-level salaries are the highest they’ve ever been. Even at the regional carriers, young pilots can bring in six figure salaries without much effort. Meanwhile at the majors, pilots are zooming up the seniority lists, with some getting captain slots before their 30th birthday. These pilots will be millionaires before age 40.

These same junior pilots skated through the COVID-19 fiasco without a hiccup. Thanks to taxpayer bailouts, they avoided furloughs and in some cases were paid nearly a full salary to simply stay at home for a year. Many took second jobs and collected two salaries.

For those of us of baby-boomer and Generation X vintage, such fortune is difficult to fathom.

In my day, regional pilots were making fifteen grand a year and paying for their own training. Most pilots didn’t make it to the majors until well into their 30s, if they made it at all. After slogging it out at the regionals and a cargo carrier for nine years, I was hired by a major carrier in the spring of 2000 at age 35. Starting pay at the time was around $30,000 a year.

Then came the industry crash in 2001, and thousands of us found ourselves laid off. Those who kept their jobs were hit with massive pay and benefit cuts and elimination of pensions as the airlines went through a cycle of chapter 11 bankruptcies.

My furlough lasted five years. When I finally went back to work in 2007, I was 40 years-old and my salary was about $65,000. That was sixth-year pay. And it was the most I’d ever made in my life.

While all that was going on, the retirement age was bumped from 60 to 65. You think two years is a drag chute on your career progression, try five. But we dealt with it, and now we too can work until that age.

Long and short, we have some catching up to do. Those two extra years would be a huge help. The money, the health benefits.

New-hires in 2024 are earning in their first one or two years what it took us a decade’s worth of seniority to make. Projected over a thirty or forty-year career, the earning potential for a pilot hired today is absurd. Adjust for inflation all you want; the differential over any length of time is huge.

Wars, recessions, and any of a dozen other calamities could set the industry reeling yet again, it’s true. But that doesn’t offset the tremendously good fortune the newest pilots are currently basking in. My peers and I faced those same risks, but without the front-end benefits of today’s generation. Things might go sour at some point, but if nothing else they’re making fantastic money in the meantime. For us that wasn’t the case.

The younger gang is having its cake and eating it too, frosting and all. Maybe it’s human nature; call it selfishenss or self-interest. If I were in their shoes, what would my vote be? Still it feels greedy, even petty, as one generation of pilots prevents its predecessors from making up lost ground.

Original Story:
DIGNIFIED AND OLD

Related Story:
THE REGIONAL RECKONING.

Photo courtesy of Unsplash.
Numbers graphic by the author.