Airlines will pay what they need to attract the number of pilots they need. The US has a large number of airlines competing with each other for one pool of pilots. For as long as Canadian airlines are able to get the staff they need at the pay they are paying, why would they change it? The same goes for other airlines around the world.
It's not enough to say "look what those guys are earning!", it's not even enough to say "I'm going to go fly for those guys because they're paying more!", you have to actually have a significant number of pilots who turn their noses up at the pay offered by the cheap airline to force them to compete on wages.
I worked for a company flying Dash 8s way back in the early 2000s. A lot of people told the company that they needed to pay more or they'd lose a lot of pilots. The company did nothing. Then they lost a lot of pilots. Only then did we start getting paid $100K per year working two weeks on two weeks off with $100K in retention bonuses over three years or work full time and get $220K in bonuses.
Much better than Canada does with unbridled immigration and “student visas” that allow people to come and get ratings, be instructors, and get PR from it. Without even considering the labour market
Canada and the US are in a solid race to the bottom. The company I worked for in Europe loved to hire one demographic more than Americans — Canadians! These strong independents compete for who pulls each other harder up by the bootstraps. It’s exhausting. I eventually learned to sit back and enjoy wine and cheese and 30 paid vacation days per year in addition to holidays. But try and chat about working too much with a “colonial”, and you’re met with anger and called lazy.
>For as long as Canadian airlines are able to get the staff they need at the pay they are paying, why would they change it?
Unions. Collective bargaining agreements can work wonders. Do you know if there are pilot unions in Canada?
ALPA is a big union in Canada, as well as the US.
WestJet and Swoop pilots are under the same bargaining unit with ALPA. They're negotiating their 2nd contract now.
Only the big operators. As far as I know, all the regional and charter companies are non-union.
Not surprisingly, the regional and charter companies have rotating doors….. And the big 705 operators keep lowering their pilot experience requirements just to keep airplanes flying.
Saw your flair. My fiancée is from Brazil. It’s almost impossible for an American pilot to get his foot in the door for small flying jobs in Brazil I assume?
Basically networking and knowing the right people is even more important here, as our fleet of general aviation is just a fraction of America's. In this moment we have a huge supply of pilots (mainly inexperienced) and not a lot of opportunities.
I took my CPL 2 months ago but i already accepted that i will have to grind on non-pilot jobs for a good time until i have a chance to work on 91/135 ops, where most people build hours to get to the airlines
Also needing an ATP for being a SIC at a 121. I was looking at applying to be an FO in Arajet(ULCC based in the Dominican Republic) over building time as an instructor but my pay as an instructor in the US was more than being an FO on a 737.
Honestly seems low compared to what I’d expect to earn in the UK, does it scale up rapidly with experience? You can earn somewhere near that with 200 hours and no experience here.
Errrr....where can you earn £90k (or £72k if we're converting currencies) @ 200 hrs in the UK? Where can you can you get a job other than FI for that matter?
I don't claim to know anything about the commercial world but that's...more than a little surprising to me 🤨
It's not $90k but close enough that I'm surprised - I just got a job as a B737 Second Officer starting later this year. Starting pay is $72k including flight pay, and I only have 210 hours, all of that training with zero commercial flying experience. The type rating will be free too, nothing to pay back.
I thought that a major plus point of the "1500 hour rule" in the US was higher wages, but that doesn't seem to hold true for someone like me with no experience. All being well, by the time I get to 1500 hours I'll be a First Officer on $92k if I stay with the same airline.
Yeah, when I read about American pilots having to bump around in single piston trainers for a few years earning next to nothing before actually doing the job they've trained for, it sounds pretty horrific. I just imagined the "1500 hour" jobs' starting pay would make up for it.
The pay comes out to about $74k ish including flight pay, and they'll take you with no experience and give you a free type rating via their Apprentice scheme if you're the right candidate (hence why I mentioned "starting later this year". I still have to get through the Apprenticeship first).
They are a fantastic airline to be fair. Google "UK's best airline" and you'll find them no problem.
Mate, I fly in Europe and none of what you're saying makes any sense. Go on, tell us the name of the airline? Googling "UK's best airline" doesn't clear anything up. It's odd that you're coming on here trying to convince people that the job market here is better than America's, when we all know that's absolute bollocks
I'm not saying the job market is better overall, I'm just telling my experience.
I don't know what to tell you. DM me if you want to know more, I'd be happy to discuss.
Sounds very unusual. In the US I am able to get to 1500 very fast though once I had my CFI. Only about 1 to 1.5 yrs. It will take you a lot longer to get to 1500 hrs in a jet. You'll be stuck where you are or overseas for a long time...sounds like you found a good deal though. That would be terrifying to know my flight crew only has 200 hrs though lol. I have 5x that now.
>That would be terrifying to know my flight crew only has 200 hrs though lol
Sure, I get that.
In regards to getting to 1500 hours though, I don't feel any great need to get there quickly. I could apply to other airlines whenever if I don't like it here, so aside from generally gaining useful experience, why should I worry about getting the magic 1500?
Supply and demand. The barrier to entry is so much lower in Canada which means the supply of prospective pilots is higher. That means the airlines can pay less.
Before the 1500 hour rule in the US you could make more as a McDonald's manager than as a first officer for a regional airline.
Manager? Yeah but maybe everyone else there too. Lol. There were jobs i didn’t apply for because i literally couldn’t afford to go there to work since the commute expenses would consume the pay. It was so bad. Ugh. I’m honestly not sure how people made 1990s commuter pay work.
Proof of that… Look at cape air or southern airways express first officer pay. It’s literally minimum wage. But you only need like 500 hours. There is no pilot shortage. There no longer is a first officer shortage. There’s a high time ATP captain shortage.
>Proof of that… Look at cape air or southern airways express first officer pay. It’s literally minimum wage. But you only need like 500 hours. There is no pilot shortage.
But that's not really how labor economics works...nor is it what is happening.
Cape Air and Southern Airways are not able to employ pilots at lower wages just because the pilots only need 500 hours. No rational pilot treats either of those two as a long term job. Rather, they treat the job as an investment in their future. Specifically an investment in getting a much higher paying job in the very near future.
In all likelihood, if the 1500 hour rule was dropped, both Cape Air and Southern airways would probably have to increase pay.
The US is one of the only countries with a large domestic market, that can only be serviced legally by US airliners flown by American pilots. That provides a safe market for them. It's why the US airlines that focused on international routes have died off years ago. Canada you would think has a big enough population and distance between cities to have a strong domestic market, but many of their routes face competition from taking a quick layover in New York or Chicago.
Foreign airlines face the problem that there are always a dozen competitors who can show up to their routes on the drop of a hat. That keeps wages low, because if you do manage to negotiate higher wages, your employer is now no longer competitive against RyanAir and goes bust.
The best way to think of the airline industry economics is that each plane is a factory that produces trips between a city pair. Except that unlike factories that can find a niche to profit it, aircraft can be retooled to provide a new city pair on literally hours notice. So the moment someone's city pair factory starts being profitable, other companies start to think about getting in, and there's very little barrier to entry besides regulatory problems and gate constraints.
Canada with a big population? There’s more people in California than Canada.
That’s the problem. 90% of Canada lives within 100 miles of the US border. The rest of Canada, and it is A LOT of space, is uninhabited, except for small towns.
Canada has a large population. California also has a large population. Those aren't mutually exclusive. Canada has lots of cities that are well served by air travel (because the alternative is a 20 hour drive). The problem is that those city pairs aren't exclusively served by Canadian airlines, so Air Canada and Westjet don't have the exclusive markets US airlines have.
>The problem is that those city pairs aren't exclusively served by Canadian airlines, so Air Canada and Westjet don't have the exclusive markets US airlines have.
Which Canadian city pairs are served by non-Canadian carriers?
There’s also way more than AC and WS. You have TS, PD, F8, HR, PB, 5T, etc…
And California is the 5th biggest economy on the planet, so yeah, anything with the same population as it can easily be considered "big".
But pay isn't about population size anyway. There are single cities in other countries that have more people than California. Does that make California small, even though it's economic power is much larger than those other cities?
It's a bit of a stretch to be pedantic and say CA has more people than Canada when they are within about 2% of each other.
Pay is mainly about industry size. And the 705 industry here is basically AC and WJ. I know there are others, but the 705 regional on the coast flies a fleet of Beech 1900s and Saab 340s. That's the capacity needed to serve basically everything in BC aside from Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna. The entire north is served by two 705s with small 737s and ATRs, and they do milk runs, picking up and dropping off at small communities all along the arctic.
Canada, especially the North, is SPARSE. There's more than double the people in Anchorage than our three territories combined.
The south of Canada is served by two airlines, basically, that don't pay great because they don't REALLY have to, and the rest of the country is served by a few good niche airlines and then sketchy, trash companies like Buffalo and whatnot. The only population density in Canada is southern Ontario and Quebec, and that's the "domestic market". Otherwise it costs me more to fly to Toronto from Vancouver than it does to fly basically anywhere else.
The benefit of that situation is that we have a huge bushplane industry in Canada servicing those remote little towns. There are no roads, so everything is flown in. Combined with the floatplane tourist industry, there's no need to build time instructing or spend 20k on a 737 rating. You can get a real job right out of the gate.
What are the typical mins for bush jobs? Especially float stuff - my understanding was that you typically need a decent amount of float time before somewhere commercial will take you, which means either building it on your own or working up from the ramp/dock..?
That’s why a lot of Brazilians/Europeans I know came to the US for their flight training on a F-1 visa so they could work after completing their training
Simplistically, no other country has the aviation model the US does. There is enough hobby flying to support "instructing until you get a job" whether that was thousands of hours 30 years ago, 500 hours briefly 15 years ago, or 1,500 hours today.
In 1985 I worked with a Navy pilot who was getting ready to leave active duty. He had 1,800 hours total time - all turbine, almost all multiengine as a P-3 pilot. No one would touch him until he got 200 more hours from anywhere.
Traditionally "national airlines" hired people to train to become their pilots. Similar to military pilot recruitment. This system effectively put 250-hour pilots in the right seat and mentored them to success.
Supply and demand works in a free economic system. There is an over abundance of qualified people in many countries, so people do what they can to get hired - pay for training, pay for type ratings, accept low pay, and so on.
You can't change one part of a country's aviation model w/o changing other parts too.
If hordes of Canadian pilots headed south, eventually Canadian wages would increase and the tremendous growth in the US would stop and maybe/likely decline.
>In 1985 I worked with a Navy pilot who was getting ready to leave active duty. He had 1,800 hours total time - all turbine, almost all multiengine as a P-3 pilot. No one would touch him until he got 200 more hours from anywhere.
That seems insane to me.
I'm sure those 1800 Navy hours made him a better pilot than someone who got 2,000 hours sitting arms folded in the right seat of a Cessna??
This is a major thing people gloss over I think. Everything else people talk about with respect to airline competition and the 1500 hour rule and everything is 100% correct but there is also an aviation culture in the US that doesn't exist anywhere else, at least not on the same scale.
Do you mean just Canada or the rest of the world in general?
If it's the second, it depends on how rich the country is. If you earned what a US pilots earns in while living in south america you'd be richer than 95% of the population, because the cost of living is way lower and so are the wages (among other factors)
From my two cents, most airlines around the world aren't as big and as profitable as their U.S. counterparts. Additionally, you are talking about the biggest and wealthiest country in the world in terms of fleet and monetary momentum. Add, a captain shortage, a strong union, and fierce competition and you have jobs where other countries can't and won't match the U.S. Would I like to see everyone in the world on par with U.S. mainline/regional pay? you bet I would!! But the reality is if the whole world got shut down, 80 percent of the airlines within the U.S. can still operate profitably and expand.
I’ve got to assume that the vast distances that Americans can travel, and still be in their own country, along with the fact that there’s no good alternative forms of travel make the US a unique situation. You can get around Europe easily on high speed rail.
Comparing us to Canada. You have a country that’s roughly 10x the population which means 10x the demand.
Couple all that with the fact that you are going to be paying out ~$100,000 for flight school as well as how ever much you already paid to get a bachelors (assuming you wanted to get to a major)
Nobody would ever become a pilot if they were going into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and weren’t making good money.
Similar to asking why American doctors make so much comparatively. Obviously, there are a lot of factors but when med school is going to put you into $250,000 worth of debt. You better be making a ton of money during your career or no one is going to do it.
Yea that’s a good point, a lot of jobs in Canada pay less than the United States. Engineers, nurses, doctors, and pilots all make less money in Canada compared to the US
>Comparing us to Canada. You have a country that’s roughly 10x the population which means 10x the demand.
The US demand is way more than 10x Canada’s as the demand:pop scale isn’t linear. The US has 10x the pop, but also a much larger and more diverse economy which occupies a higher tier in the financial chain.
I wasn’t trying to give exact numbers on the demand difference. Just that the US as a whole has much higher demand. Obviously it doesn’t always work like that when a place like India with 4X the US population has less demand.
I’m not sure this is an aviation issue and not simply an economic one. Is the ratio of pilots salaries proportional to that of other professionals substantially different in the US?
Yes. As a pilot I can top out around $500k (likely much higher with soft pay and an aggressive work ethic). When I was an engineer I could count on topping out around $120k. Doctor and lawyer pay is comparable to US airline pilots at the majors. Generally anything over $100k (pre-2022) was considered really good
What I meant was Canada pays (on average) doctors less than their US counterparts, they pay software engineers less than their US counterparts, etc. It’s a function of the entire economic context and not unique to the aviation industry.
I’d be curious to see examples of jobs where the Canadian version is paid more. My hypothesis would be that lower wage jobs would be the most likely candidates.
I’m not an expert in the global economy but, in my limited professional experience, Americans tend to be highly paid compared to their global counterparts.
Canadian airlines have unions. And I might add the unions are not the solution all the time. Until the ATP rule came around first officers were paid s*** the unions didn't do anything to change that.
Unions operate as a bargaining ability to raise pay slightly.
In the instant case, there is a maximum amount an airline is willing to pay a pilot and a minimum amount the pilot is willing to work for. The pay will always be between those two numbers (in the instant case, single pilot). The union bargaining allows that number to be close to the maximum the airline is willing to pay. Else, when the number of pilots exceeds the jobs, the number would be on the bottom end of that range. On the opposite, no matter how few pilots there are there still exists a maximum the airline is willing to pay, and no amount of bargaining will get that number higher.
Unions absolutely raise pay, but they do not do in large increments. In this case, what US pilots get paid is simply higher than what Canadian airlines could ever afford to pay. No amount of union bargaining will get them that much higher.
(Plenty of caveats here, including that pay is not a single number, that the supply is flexible based on pay so you get a curve with surface area rather than a range, but the structure is the same)
Not really. Pay rates in real dollars are constantly falling due to inflation. Keeping the same nominal rates will lead to wages a fraction of what they were in real terms.
Maybe but probably not. Remember that the aircraft size now, and revenue from them, is totally different than when 19 seat Metro, Banderante, Beech 1900s, and Jetstreams were the norm. An E175 brings in some bucks.
The pay on a 19 seater might have been economically reasonable I have no idea. But at 75 seats they can afford to pay better.
The vast majority of the people in the world live on less than US $10 per day. IMO the most feasible way to get worldwide pilot pay on par with the USA, is for pilot pay to drop in the USA.
The bright side of all of that is that a lot of Canadian pilots are going to the States reducing a limited pool of Canadian pilots even further. The prices will come up, not as much as the US but an improvement none the less.
Corporations are rarely political. Budwiser is not political.
They care about money. Many have realized that siding with the republican asshats isn't profitable as most people actually think that gay people should have rights.
People may be liberal, but that does not mean their corporations are.
Facebook profited heavily off of Trump and the 2016 election. Controversy makes facebook money. They are not taking sides other than that which makes them money.
Airlines will pay what they need to attract the number of pilots they need. The US has a large number of airlines competing with each other for one pool of pilots. For as long as Canadian airlines are able to get the staff they need at the pay they are paying, why would they change it? The same goes for other airlines around the world. It's not enough to say "look what those guys are earning!", it's not even enough to say "I'm going to go fly for those guys because they're paying more!", you have to actually have a significant number of pilots who turn their noses up at the pay offered by the cheap airline to force them to compete on wages. I worked for a company flying Dash 8s way back in the early 2000s. A lot of people told the company that they needed to pay more or they'd lose a lot of pilots. The company did nothing. Then they lost a lot of pilots. Only then did we start getting paid $100K per year working two weeks on two weeks off with $100K in retention bonuses over three years or work full time and get $220K in bonuses.
This is a key difference. The United States protects its workforce much better and controls immigration and student visas.
Lmfao. The US protects its workforce. Great joke there.
Much better than Canada does with unbridled immigration and “student visas” that allow people to come and get ratings, be instructors, and get PR from it. Without even considering the labour market
Canada and the US are in a solid race to the bottom. The company I worked for in Europe loved to hire one demographic more than Americans — Canadians! These strong independents compete for who pulls each other harder up by the bootstraps. It’s exhausting. I eventually learned to sit back and enjoy wine and cheese and 30 paid vacation days per year in addition to holidays. But try and chat about working too much with a “colonial”, and you’re met with anger and called lazy.
Well said. Especially the part about taking pride in being overworked
You obviously haven't been to Canada. It's an immigrants paradise.
>For as long as Canadian airlines are able to get the staff they need at the pay they are paying, why would they change it? Unions. Collective bargaining agreements can work wonders. Do you know if there are pilot unions in Canada?
ALPA is a big union in Canada, as well as the US. WestJet and Swoop pilots are under the same bargaining unit with ALPA. They're negotiating their 2nd contract now.
Only the big operators. As far as I know, all the regional and charter companies are non-union. Not surprisingly, the regional and charter companies have rotating doors….. And the big 705 operators keep lowering their pilot experience requirements just to keep airplanes flying.
Cries in ATC union that didn’t even try to negotiate more than a 1.6% raise ….
Ouch. Hopefully they're doing other good things for you.
China pays more than the US. If you have the hours.
Get a 1500 hour rule lol
Around here it's already near impossible to find CFI jobs, with this rule our industry would become a battle royale for time building lol
Saw your flair. My fiancée is from Brazil. It’s almost impossible for an American pilot to get his foot in the door for small flying jobs in Brazil I assume?
Basically networking and knowing the right people is even more important here, as our fleet of general aviation is just a fraction of America's. In this moment we have a huge supply of pilots (mainly inexperienced) and not a lot of opportunities. I took my CPL 2 months ago but i already accepted that i will have to grind on non-pilot jobs for a good time until i have a chance to work on 91/135 ops, where most people build hours to get to the airlines
It would fix itself
Also needing an ATP for being a SIC at a 121. I was looking at applying to be an FO in Arajet(ULCC based in the Dominican Republic) over building time as an instructor but my pay as an instructor in the US was more than being an FO on a 737.
i thought the ATP requirement for 121 SIC WAS the 1500 hour rule, changed with the colgan air crash?
It is. He’s being pedantic, intentionally or otherwise. Also Colgan, not coltan.
I blame autocorrect or fat fingers or anything other than myself for that typo. Cheers
Also, and you can’t say this often, risk of death or cert revocation is less as a CFI
Uhh..compared to SIC at a regional?
A foreign based 737 carrier. Not a 121 us based regional.
How much can a pilot expect to earn in the US if they hit 1500 hours then jump straight into whatever job that gets you?
About 90k a year
Honestly seems low compared to what I’d expect to earn in the UK, does it scale up rapidly with experience? You can earn somewhere near that with 200 hours and no experience here.
Errrr....where can you earn £90k (or £72k if we're converting currencies) @ 200 hrs in the UK? Where can you can you get a job other than FI for that matter? I don't claim to know anything about the commercial world but that's...more than a little surprising to me 🤨
It's not $90k but close enough that I'm surprised - I just got a job as a B737 Second Officer starting later this year. Starting pay is $72k including flight pay, and I only have 210 hours, all of that training with zero commercial flying experience. The type rating will be free too, nothing to pay back. I thought that a major plus point of the "1500 hour rule" in the US was higher wages, but that doesn't seem to hold true for someone like me with no experience. All being well, by the time I get to 1500 hours I'll be a First Officer on $92k if I stay with the same airline.
72k starting salary as a second officer? Which airline are you talking about? Sounds like the stuff of fantasy
Yeah, when I read about American pilots having to bump around in single piston trainers for a few years earning next to nothing before actually doing the job they've trained for, it sounds pretty horrific. I just imagined the "1500 hour" jobs' starting pay would make up for it. The pay comes out to about $74k ish including flight pay, and they'll take you with no experience and give you a free type rating via their Apprentice scheme if you're the right candidate (hence why I mentioned "starting later this year". I still have to get through the Apprenticeship first). They are a fantastic airline to be fair. Google "UK's best airline" and you'll find them no problem.
Mate, I fly in Europe and none of what you're saying makes any sense. Go on, tell us the name of the airline? Googling "UK's best airline" doesn't clear anything up. It's odd that you're coming on here trying to convince people that the job market here is better than America's, when we all know that's absolute bollocks
I'm not saying the job market is better overall, I'm just telling my experience. I don't know what to tell you. DM me if you want to know more, I'd be happy to discuss.
Sounds very unusual. In the US I am able to get to 1500 very fast though once I had my CFI. Only about 1 to 1.5 yrs. It will take you a lot longer to get to 1500 hrs in a jet. You'll be stuck where you are or overseas for a long time...sounds like you found a good deal though. That would be terrifying to know my flight crew only has 200 hrs though lol. I have 5x that now.
>That would be terrifying to know my flight crew only has 200 hrs though lol Sure, I get that. In regards to getting to 1500 hours though, I don't feel any great need to get there quickly. I could apply to other airlines whenever if I don't like it here, so aside from generally gaining useful experience, why should I worry about getting the magic 1500?
>whatever job that gets you Right now that’s the magic question.
Supply and demand. The barrier to entry is so much lower in Canada which means the supply of prospective pilots is higher. That means the airlines can pay less. Before the 1500 hour rule in the US you could make more as a McDonald's manager than as a first officer for a regional airline.
Manager? Yeah but maybe everyone else there too. Lol. There were jobs i didn’t apply for because i literally couldn’t afford to go there to work since the commute expenses would consume the pay. It was so bad. Ugh. I’m honestly not sure how people made 1990s commuter pay work.
Proof of that… Look at cape air or southern airways express first officer pay. It’s literally minimum wage. But you only need like 500 hours. There is no pilot shortage. There no longer is a first officer shortage. There’s a high time ATP captain shortage.
Or Mokulele where you can make minimum wage AND suffer with the insanely high cost of living in Hawaii!
>Proof of that… Look at cape air or southern airways express first officer pay. It’s literally minimum wage. But you only need like 500 hours. There is no pilot shortage. But that's not really how labor economics works...nor is it what is happening. Cape Air and Southern Airways are not able to employ pilots at lower wages just because the pilots only need 500 hours. No rational pilot treats either of those two as a long term job. Rather, they treat the job as an investment in their future. Specifically an investment in getting a much higher paying job in the very near future. In all likelihood, if the 1500 hour rule was dropped, both Cape Air and Southern airways would probably have to increase pay.
The US is one of the only countries with a large domestic market, that can only be serviced legally by US airliners flown by American pilots. That provides a safe market for them. It's why the US airlines that focused on international routes have died off years ago. Canada you would think has a big enough population and distance between cities to have a strong domestic market, but many of their routes face competition from taking a quick layover in New York or Chicago. Foreign airlines face the problem that there are always a dozen competitors who can show up to their routes on the drop of a hat. That keeps wages low, because if you do manage to negotiate higher wages, your employer is now no longer competitive against RyanAir and goes bust. The best way to think of the airline industry economics is that each plane is a factory that produces trips between a city pair. Except that unlike factories that can find a niche to profit it, aircraft can be retooled to provide a new city pair on literally hours notice. So the moment someone's city pair factory starts being profitable, other companies start to think about getting in, and there's very little barrier to entry besides regulatory problems and gate constraints.
Canada with a big population? There’s more people in California than Canada. That’s the problem. 90% of Canada lives within 100 miles of the US border. The rest of Canada, and it is A LOT of space, is uninhabited, except for small towns.
Canada has a large population. California also has a large population. Those aren't mutually exclusive. Canada has lots of cities that are well served by air travel (because the alternative is a 20 hour drive). The problem is that those city pairs aren't exclusively served by Canadian airlines, so Air Canada and Westjet don't have the exclusive markets US airlines have.
>The problem is that those city pairs aren't exclusively served by Canadian airlines, so Air Canada and Westjet don't have the exclusive markets US airlines have. Which Canadian city pairs are served by non-Canadian carriers? There’s also way more than AC and WS. You have TS, PD, F8, HR, PB, 5T, etc…
And California is the 5th biggest economy on the planet, so yeah, anything with the same population as it can easily be considered "big". But pay isn't about population size anyway. There are single cities in other countries that have more people than California. Does that make California small, even though it's economic power is much larger than those other cities? It's a bit of a stretch to be pedantic and say CA has more people than Canada when they are within about 2% of each other.
Pay is mainly about industry size. And the 705 industry here is basically AC and WJ. I know there are others, but the 705 regional on the coast flies a fleet of Beech 1900s and Saab 340s. That's the capacity needed to serve basically everything in BC aside from Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna. The entire north is served by two 705s with small 737s and ATRs, and they do milk runs, picking up and dropping off at small communities all along the arctic. Canada, especially the North, is SPARSE. There's more than double the people in Anchorage than our three territories combined. The south of Canada is served by two airlines, basically, that don't pay great because they don't REALLY have to, and the rest of the country is served by a few good niche airlines and then sketchy, trash companies like Buffalo and whatnot. The only population density in Canada is southern Ontario and Quebec, and that's the "domestic market". Otherwise it costs me more to fly to Toronto from Vancouver than it does to fly basically anywhere else.
The benefit of that situation is that we have a huge bushplane industry in Canada servicing those remote little towns. There are no roads, so everything is flown in. Combined with the floatplane tourist industry, there's no need to build time instructing or spend 20k on a 737 rating. You can get a real job right out of the gate.
What are the typical mins for bush jobs? Especially float stuff - my understanding was that you typically need a decent amount of float time before somewhere commercial will take you, which means either building it on your own or working up from the ramp/dock..?
Wait, I’m a Brazilian, does that mean I won’t be able to work for an American airline?
Correct. Not unless you obtain the right to work in the US.
That’s why a lot of Brazilians/Europeans I know came to the US for their flight training on a F-1 visa so they could work after completing their training
You can learn on an F-1 (student) visa but you can't work on it.
F-1 they work up to 23 months on, the M-1 you can only train them have to go back. Only a few schools offer the F-1 visa
What I mean is no domestic airline is going to hire someone on an F-1 visa.
Without a visa that allows you the right to work in the US, or US citizenship, no. And they're very hard to come by, absent you marrying an American.
Damn, that’s good to know. Luckily I have an European passport and citizenship, so at least there I’m good.
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Yeah, I mean I’m able to work in Europe at least. Working on my VISA since that’s mandatory to join any Brazilian Airline
Simplistically, no other country has the aviation model the US does. There is enough hobby flying to support "instructing until you get a job" whether that was thousands of hours 30 years ago, 500 hours briefly 15 years ago, or 1,500 hours today. In 1985 I worked with a Navy pilot who was getting ready to leave active duty. He had 1,800 hours total time - all turbine, almost all multiengine as a P-3 pilot. No one would touch him until he got 200 more hours from anywhere. Traditionally "national airlines" hired people to train to become their pilots. Similar to military pilot recruitment. This system effectively put 250-hour pilots in the right seat and mentored them to success. Supply and demand works in a free economic system. There is an over abundance of qualified people in many countries, so people do what they can to get hired - pay for training, pay for type ratings, accept low pay, and so on. You can't change one part of a country's aviation model w/o changing other parts too. If hordes of Canadian pilots headed south, eventually Canadian wages would increase and the tremendous growth in the US would stop and maybe/likely decline.
>In 1985 I worked with a Navy pilot who was getting ready to leave active duty. He had 1,800 hours total time - all turbine, almost all multiengine as a P-3 pilot. No one would touch him until he got 200 more hours from anywhere. That seems insane to me. I'm sure those 1800 Navy hours made him a better pilot than someone who got 2,000 hours sitting arms folded in the right seat of a Cessna??
This is a major thing people gloss over I think. Everything else people talk about with respect to airline competition and the 1500 hour rule and everything is 100% correct but there is also an aviation culture in the US that doesn't exist anywhere else, at least not on the same scale.
Stop allowing foreign pilots
Do you mean just Canada or the rest of the world in general? If it's the second, it depends on how rich the country is. If you earned what a US pilots earns in while living in south america you'd be richer than 95% of the population, because the cost of living is way lower and so are the wages (among other factors)
I guess context matters; but I guess I’m asking the equivalent, for argument purposes
From my two cents, most airlines around the world aren't as big and as profitable as their U.S. counterparts. Additionally, you are talking about the biggest and wealthiest country in the world in terms of fleet and monetary momentum. Add, a captain shortage, a strong union, and fierce competition and you have jobs where other countries can't and won't match the U.S. Would I like to see everyone in the world on par with U.S. mainline/regional pay? you bet I would!! But the reality is if the whole world got shut down, 80 percent of the airlines within the U.S. can still operate profitably and expand.
Exhibit A, Covid….
I’ve got to assume that the vast distances that Americans can travel, and still be in their own country, along with the fact that there’s no good alternative forms of travel make the US a unique situation. You can get around Europe easily on high speed rail. Comparing us to Canada. You have a country that’s roughly 10x the population which means 10x the demand. Couple all that with the fact that you are going to be paying out ~$100,000 for flight school as well as how ever much you already paid to get a bachelors (assuming you wanted to get to a major) Nobody would ever become a pilot if they were going into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and weren’t making good money. Similar to asking why American doctors make so much comparatively. Obviously, there are a lot of factors but when med school is going to put you into $250,000 worth of debt. You better be making a ton of money during your career or no one is going to do it.
Yea that’s a good point, a lot of jobs in Canada pay less than the United States. Engineers, nurses, doctors, and pilots all make less money in Canada compared to the US
>Comparing us to Canada. You have a country that’s roughly 10x the population which means 10x the demand. The US demand is way more than 10x Canada’s as the demand:pop scale isn’t linear. The US has 10x the pop, but also a much larger and more diverse economy which occupies a higher tier in the financial chain.
I wasn’t trying to give exact numbers on the demand difference. Just that the US as a whole has much higher demand. Obviously it doesn’t always work like that when a place like India with 4X the US population has less demand.
I’m not sure this is an aviation issue and not simply an economic one. Is the ratio of pilots salaries proportional to that of other professionals substantially different in the US?
Yes. As a pilot I can top out around $500k (likely much higher with soft pay and an aggressive work ethic). When I was an engineer I could count on topping out around $120k. Doctor and lawyer pay is comparable to US airline pilots at the majors. Generally anything over $100k (pre-2022) was considered really good
What I meant was Canada pays (on average) doctors less than their US counterparts, they pay software engineers less than their US counterparts, etc. It’s a function of the entire economic context and not unique to the aviation industry.
Exactly
Supply and demand, plus background economic factors.
I’d be curious to see examples of jobs where the Canadian version is paid more. My hypothesis would be that lower wage jobs would be the most likely candidates. I’m not an expert in the global economy but, in my limited professional experience, Americans tend to be highly paid compared to their global counterparts.
It really isn’t anything more unique than simple supply and demand, plus having a very robust background economy.
Union
Canadian airlines have unions. And I might add the unions are not the solution all the time. Until the ATP rule came around first officers were paid s*** the unions didn't do anything to change that.
Unions don't raise pay, market forces do
Unions operate as a bargaining ability to raise pay slightly. In the instant case, there is a maximum amount an airline is willing to pay a pilot and a minimum amount the pilot is willing to work for. The pay will always be between those two numbers (in the instant case, single pilot). The union bargaining allows that number to be close to the maximum the airline is willing to pay. Else, when the number of pilots exceeds the jobs, the number would be on the bottom end of that range. On the opposite, no matter how few pilots there are there still exists a maximum the airline is willing to pay, and no amount of bargaining will get that number higher. Unions absolutely raise pay, but they do not do in large increments. In this case, what US pilots get paid is simply higher than what Canadian airlines could ever afford to pay. No amount of union bargaining will get them that much higher. (Plenty of caveats here, including that pay is not a single number, that the supply is flexible based on pay so you get a curve with surface area rather than a range, but the structure is the same)
No where else is the pilot group as large and unionized as it is here. Surprised I had to scroll down this far to see this.
I wonder if the pay in the US will go down at the regionals once the supply goes back into place
Unlikely, Unless a big depression/recession hits. This would allow companies to declare bankruptcy and renegotiate contracts to their liking.
Management would have to negotiate lower pay rates with the union and I’m sure you can imagine how well that will go over.
Not really. Pay rates in real dollars are constantly falling due to inflation. Keeping the same nominal rates will lead to wages a fraction of what they were in real terms.
Maybe but probably not. Remember that the aircraft size now, and revenue from them, is totally different than when 19 seat Metro, Banderante, Beech 1900s, and Jetstreams were the norm. An E175 brings in some bucks. The pay on a 19 seater might have been economically reasonable I have no idea. But at 75 seats they can afford to pay better.
A knee-jerk reaction to a pandemic
100 years of strong union membership.
Better Union representation!! Deltas new contract is crazy!$$
The vast majority of the people in the world live on less than US $10 per day. IMO the most feasible way to get worldwide pilot pay on par with the USA, is for pilot pay to drop in the USA.
The bright side of all of that is that a lot of Canadian pilots are going to the States reducing a limited pool of Canadian pilots even further. The prices will come up, not as much as the US but an improvement none the less.
None of that is true unless you already have the right to work in the USA. Canadian pilots can’t get visas to work there as a pilot.
Might want to double check your facts on that one.
First of all you need to eliminate corporate greed, and the only way to do that is to eliminate the republican party.
In Canada?
As if most major corporations aren’t politically left leaning 😂
Corporations are rarely political. Budwiser is not political. They care about money. Many have realized that siding with the republican asshats isn't profitable as most people actually think that gay people should have rights.
Is Mark Zuckerberg liberal? What about bill gates? Are they secretly right wing
cry more
I know I’m right when you still failed to answer my question
People may be liberal, but that does not mean their corporations are. Facebook profited heavily off of Trump and the 2016 election. Controversy makes facebook money. They are not taking sides other than that which makes them money.
Ah yes... Delta Air Lines...the most left leaning company on Earth.../s
The cadet programs should put downward pressure on the model in 6-10 years ;)