[Marxism] Labor aristocracy?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, May 17, 2009
Commuter Pilot’s Life Defies Glamorous Stereotype
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER, MATTHEW L. WALD and CHRISTOPHER DREW

This article was reported by David M. Halbfinger, Matthew L. Wald and 
Christopher Drew, and written by Mr. Halbfinger.

Alex Lapointe, a 25-year-old co-pilot for a regional airline, says he 
routinely lifts off knowing he has gotten less sleep than he needs. And 
once or twice a week, he says, he sees the captain next to him 
struggling to stay alert.

Neil A. Weston, also 25, went $100,000 into debt to train for a 
co-pilot’s job that pays him $25,000 annually. He carries sandwiches in 
a cooler from his home in Dubuque, Iowa, bought his first uniform for 
$400, and holds out hope of tripling his salary by moving into the 
captain’s seat, then up to a major carrier. Assuming, that is, the 
majors start hiring again.

Capt. Paul Nietz, 58, who recently retired from a regional airline, said 
his schedule wore him down and cost him three marriages. His workweek 
typically began with a 2:30 a.m. wake-up in northern Michigan and a 6 
a.m. flight to his Chicago home bases. There, he would wait for his 
first assignment, a noon departure.

By the time he parked his aircraft at the last gate of the night, he was 
exhausted. But he would be due back at work eight hours and 15 minutes 
later. “At the very most, if you’re the kind of person that could walk 
into a hotel room, strip and lay down, you might get four and a half 
hours of sleep,” he said. “And I was very senior. I was one of the 
fortunate guys.”

The National Transportation Safety Board’s inquiry into the Feb. 12 
crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 outside Buffalo has 
highlighted the operations of the nation’s regional airlines, a sector 
of the aviation industry that has grown to account for half the 
country’s airline flights and a quarter of its passengers.

The details of that world have surprised many Americans — the strikingly 
low pay for new pilots; the rigors of flying multiple flights, at lower 
altitudes and thus often in worse weather than pilots on longer routes, 
while scrambling to get enough sleep; the relative inexperience of 
pilots at the smaller airlines, whose training standards are the same, 
but whose skills may not be.

In hearings last week in Washington, witnesses and safety officials 
raised questions of whether the crew of the plane that crashed, killing 
all 49 people on board and one on the ground, had been adequately vetted 
and whether they might have been hampered by, among other factors, fatigue.

But regardless of whether training, fatigue or the cost-cutting that has 
hit the entire industry are ultimately determined to have contributed to 
the crash of Flight 3407, interviews with current and former regional 
pilots make vividly clear the daily challenges they face.

Peek inside a crew lounge at midnight in Chicago, and one could easily 
find every recliner occupied by an off-duty aviator trying to sleep 
despite the whine of a janitor’s vacuum cleaner.

In any city with a sizable air hub, a search of Craigslist for the term 
“crash pad” will turn up listings for rooms for rent, often for $200 a 
month or less, a short drive from an airport, where a dozen or more 
pilots, unable to afford hotels, may come and go, barely letting the 
mattresses cool.

But many regional pilots, paid entry-level wages that are sometimes no 
better than a job at McDonald’s, can not afford even a crash pad.

“I know a guy who bought a car that barely ran and parked it in the 
employee lot at his base airport, and slept in his car six or seven 
times a month,” said Frank R. Graham Jr., a former regional pilot and 
airline safety director who runs a safety consulting firm in Charlotte, 
N.C. Pilots for some regional airlines have been known to sleep in the 
aisles of their planes.

Like the two Flight 3407 pilots, who caught free rides on planes from 
Florida and Seattle to their flight from Newark to Buffalo, pilots at 
regional airlines routinely hopscotch across thousands of miles to get 
to work. Some live with their parents, as the plane’s first officer, 
Rebecca L. Shaw, did. Others, like Mr. Lapointe, live near former bases 
of operations that were shut down because an employer went out of 
business or a route was dropped.

Mr. Lapointe lives in Wakefield, Mass., 15 minutes from his old base in 
Boston. Since November, he has had to get himself to Kennedy 
International Airport in New York.

For Captain Nietz, a 27-year veteran, the biggest indignity was flying 
hungry. Delays were so routine that he seldom left his plane all day 
long, even “to grab a biscuit.” With food service long discontinued, he 
said, the only bites to be had were “the occasional peanut — and the 
airlines charge the crews for bags of peanuts and cheese and crackers.”

The renewed worries over commuter planes come as passenger airlines, 
regional and mainline, have achieved unprecedented levels of safety. 
Passenger deaths per million flights are down by more than two-thirds in 
the last 10 years. The 49 people on board the Buffalo flight were the 
first in 30 months to die during a scheduled flight on a passenger carrier.

But of the six scheduled passenger flights that have crashed since Sept. 
11, 2001, only one has been from a major carrier. Four, including the 
one in Buffalo, were commuter flights; a total of 133 people died on 
those flights. (The fifth, a 50-year-old seaplane in Miami, was in 
neither category.)

And one of the worries about commuter pilots, fatigue, is also a problem 
for the mainline carriers; in fact, in some operations, the big airlines 
are more vulnerable. They are now conducting flights of 16 hours, across 
more time zones than a pilot can be expected to adapt to.

Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, who is chairman of 
the subcommittee on aviation, said Thursday that the group would hold a 
series of hearings next month. He said he was “stunned” by the Buffalo 
crew’s lack of sleep and relative inexperience.

“We need to understand, is this an aberration, or are standards 
sufficiently lax or insufficient, or insufficiently enforced that we 
need to be concerned about a much broader set of issues?” he said.

There is nothing wrong with commuting cross-country to fly, said Roger 
Cohen, the president of the Regional Airline Association, a trade group; 
after all, he pointed out, Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the US 
Airways pilot who ditched his crippled Airbus A320 in the Hudson River 
on Jan. 15, lives in Danville, Calif., and is based in Charlotte, N.C.

Mr. Cohen said he did not know what fraction of pilots commuted long 
distances to the city where they were, in airline parlance, “domiciled.”

“Anywhere from 50 to 70 percent, pick a number,” he said. But he said he 
did not think that number differed much between regional carriers and 
mainline carriers.

The Federal Aviation Administration, while it enforces one set of safety 
standards, says it does not know how the safety of the commuter airlines 
compares to the safety of the big carriers. It is working on that 
question because of the planned Senate hearings.

To the extent that Senator Dorgan’s hearings address pilot fatigue, they 
will not be the first such effort. In 1995, under pressure from the 
National Transportation Safety Board and the Air Line Pilots 
Association, the F.A.A. proposed shortening pilots’ workdays and 
redefining duty hours to include the time spent getting from plane to 
hotel and back.

But the airlines, which deny that pilot fatigue is a significant 
problem, opposed the changes, and the agency eventually backed off.

Patrick Smith, an airline pilot and aviation writer who spent years at a 
regional carrier, acknowledged that fatigue is a murky problem, with 
many causes and varying effects on different pilots, that is difficult 
to nail down as the main cause of an accident.

“But the fact that you can’t make this easy and direct link isn’t reason 
to ignore the problem,” he said. “Obviously it’s there.”

For Mr. Weston, the 25-year-old pilot from Dubuque, life in the regional 
air business is a little like being an extra in a movie. The planes he 
flies some days are labeled United Connection, others Delta Express. But 
his employer is an airline few people have ever heard of: Republic.

It is a quick hop by air but a six-hour drive from home to his base in 
Indianapolis, where he stays overnight with an aunt before starting his 
four-day workweek. His workdays run 12 hours, sometimes 16, far from home.

He said this really was a dream job for him and many of his fellow 
pilots, even though some have to hold down second jobs.

Asked if he flew for pleasure, he laughed.

“I can’t afford it,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Robbie Brown, Benedict Carey, Ray Rivera, 
Nate Schweber and Leslie Wayne.

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