What's a Pilot Worth?

I've been thinking about the pictures I just saw, taken on 28 September, of some 700 uniformed airline pilots picketing on Wall Street.

This marching band of brothers and sisters (sporting no trombones or piccolos)   wore sandwich boards proclaiming the rhetorical question, "WHAT'S A PILOT WORTH?" Below the slogan was the famous photo of that US Airways Airbus A-320 in the Hudson River with all those passengers calmly standing cheek-by-jowl on the wings, awaiting rescue by boats from the nearby shore.

The headline said the pilots had joined the Occupy Wall Street protesters, but these protests were entirely separate events. The pilots had been planning this informational picketing for months, this event had nothing to do with these other protesters, and the pilots kept to themselves. I know this is true, because it was my company's pilots who planned the event.

What's a pilot worth?  Surely there is some way to measure such value.

I have been an airline pilot for 34 years. This is my tribe up there, picketing on Wall Street. Even with our pay cuts and the pensions stolen by the most predatory leaders of the worst of the airlines, it's a little hard to feel too sorry for us, when most of us earn considerably more than average. Yes, it's right to wonder what a pilot is really worth. Yes, it was a most inspiring sight to see Captain Sullenberger and every one of his passengers lined up on the wing of that US Airways Airbus he safely landed in the Hudson. The lives of every one of those people was saved that day by the pilots'  inspiring display of judgment and skill. Our world often seems to be lacking in such good judgment and skill. It's hard to measure this kind of value. Afterwards we learned that among other costly indignities, the pilots of US Airways have suffered the theft of their pensions by greedy management.



So really, what is a pilot worth? On a day like that one in the Hudson, a
pilot's worth appears to be as much as life itself, indeed, of many lives ... a pilot's worth is incalculable.

The concept of value has more than one aspect. Economic value is not the same as moral value or our personal valuation of the stuff of life and love.

We can't put a price on the moral worth of Captain Sullenberger's good judgment and skill.

And yet, we must calculate the economic worth of pilots if individuals are to be attracted to work as pilots. Indeed, we must calculate the economic value of  every other factor of production too, if the economic system is to generate the signals by which, as Mises always put it, the flow of scarce resources is to be directed into those lines which stand the best chance of satisfying the most urgent demands of consumers.

These signals are called prices ... and in a free market, it is the consumers who reign supreme and, by their free choices of where to spend or not spend their money, dictate the fate of every firm. A price is not just an arbitrary sum dreamed up by the boards of bored, bureaucratic commisars of central planning, sitting in an office in some far-flung city, flinging darts across the room at a price chart on the wall. A price is the sum of all the choices of every individual in the world on what to spend or not for which goods and services. In a free market, a price thereby democratically captures the preferences of everybody in the long chain of factors that bear on the production of each good or service.

Every government intervention therefore robs the consumers of their choices. That's what this intervention is ... so why isn't this obvious to anybody with a brain? Because we LIKE our governments to intervene on our behalf and give us all the goodies we want, even though the funding for such goodies must be taken out of the hides of other people. Or created out of thin air, which is what central banking does, which in turn is still taking it out of the hides of the citizens because printing phony money dilutes the value of the currency and in effect steals the value of the money in the hands of the citizens.

Frederic Bastiat, the great French economist of the early 19th century, had it right when he wrote, "Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

My opinion is that many airline owners and leaders are indeed big jerks of a greedy, grasping, and predatory bent, but they nevertheless know they have to please the public well enough to stay in business.

By contrast, the unions are clueless, self-serving ninnies with their minds
marred by cognitive dissonance ... the unions' and the pilots' beliefs tend to be a nasty broth of diluted Marxist dogma (although few of us recognize it as such because most of us don't know beans about philosophy) and this far-left rhetoric is mixed with a vestigial respect for free markets that still faintly wafts like a whiff of perfume through the minds of many Americans.

When young people ask me if they should become pilots, I tell them what my parents, who were symphony string players, told me about becoming a professional musician: if you can imagine yourself being happy at another job, do that other job instead! If you can't imagine yourself being happy doing anything else, then and only then should you go into music (or flying.)

So the lesson is that you should do what you love ... figure out what you love, then go live your life and be happy. Nothing else counts so much. And anything goes, so long as it's peaceful and respectful of the equal rights of others to their own lives and dreams.

The airline business is among the craziest and most chaotic lines on the planet! If you don't love flying, you'll never get through the early years of the profession, when the greatest danger is poverty. There are even some regional airline pilots based in expensive hub cities, flying little jets, who qualify for food stamps!


Commercial pilots' starting pay is absurdly low because so many people want to be pilots, and because the economic reality is that a worker's pay can never be more than a fraction of the revenue stream that the worker, using the capital at his or her disposal, can generate for the company. We begin flying little airplanes, and this capital cannot generate much revenue for the companies, so our pay can't be higher than this revenue.

But ... we remember the halcyon days of yore when airline pilots lived like fat cats! And we yearn to have all that again!

Of course, there is more to the story.

And here we are again: what is a pilot worth?

The reality of a pilot's economic worth is catching up to the former glory of the profession, when pilots' pay was determined, not by competitive markets, but by the machinations of the late lamented CAB, the Civil Aeronautics Board (can you believe that a government agency was once disbanded? Yes! With the airline deregulation act of 1978.)

The CAB granted all airlines permission for every detail of their existence; which companies could serve which cities, charging what fares, etc. The unions would say, "More pay please," the airlines would then go to the CAB and say, "Higher fares please," and the CAB would grab their rubber stamp and presto! Higher fares. It was an unholy cabal between the government, the crony-capitalists, and the unions, run very much like medieval guild socialism ... which was fine, if you were the unions, the government, or the airlines. Under this system, pilots pay was enormous ... far more than we could have made in a more competitive system, and, as I said, pilots lived high on the hog.

The only trouble with this delightful cabal was that nobody could afford to fly the airlines regularly except rich people and big businesses with expense accounts! Now that there is more competition among airlines, pilots' pay, like every other factor of production, has had to fall more in line with economic reality. Sorry, guys.

Today, even in the middle of this terrible economy, the airlines serve three times as many passengers as they did before deregulation of routes and fares. Airline flying is now the normal mode of transportation, and replaced automobiles, busses and trains because of the lower fares that resulted from all the vastly increased competition to serve passengers.

Of course, all this competition has put a lot of airlines out of business. It ain't the good ol' days, in the eyes of pilots.



I myself have FOUR bankrupt airlines on my resume (call it six now, if I
include the two bankruptcies at the airline with which my company is just now
merging!) ... and this story is not merely anecdotal evidence, it's not just my
own cloud of bad luck, because there is a high percentage of pilots with this
many or even more bankrupt airlines on their resumes!



There are other challenges to being a pilot too. For example, I loathe, hate, and despise being treated like a criminal when I go through airport security (except in Israel, where they actually know who the bad guys are, and aren't afraid to name them) ... but still ... when we finally close the main cabin door, when we get away from all the ninnies-in-charge (except for the inescapable ATC ... don't get me started on ATC!) and shove off the pier and get airborne ... I still love the job! If you've got to have a J-O-B ... and you don't have a trust fund to support your precious little fantasies ... it doesn't get much better than this. And nobody in the world has a better view from their office than I do!

What's a pilot worth? What's it to you, the passenger? What are you willing to pay? That's what a pilot's worth.

Don't tell the pilot picketers ... it'll just make 'em mad.