Maybe many times a year, most of us trust our lives to a group of complete strangers. Though we do not know them, for hours at a time our lives depend on their judgement and their competence. If they make an error, it is very unlikely that we, or indeed they, will live to regret it.
We are speaking, of course, of airline pilots, a group of highly trained individuals who fly millions of people around the world’s skies every year. There are crashes, some through pilot error, some through mechanical failure, but mile for mile, air travel is still the safest form of any travel, beating even pedestrians. Fortunately, emergencies are few and far between, but they do occur. Ten years ago, a jumbo jet flying over the Pacific flew into a cloud of volcanic dust at 36,000 feet. All four engines cut out. The plane fell 20,000 feet while the pilot and his crew wrestled to restart the engines. It was only flying skills of the highest order that enabled the aircraft to survive this potential disaster.
Pilots, therefore, deserve the high salaries that many are paid. The problem is that from airline to airline, a pilot’s earnings vary. Since English is the international language by which pilots and ground control operators converse, there is no real barrier to having a pilot of any nationality flying with any airline. Thus, the big paying airlines have tended to draw away the very top pilots to their cockpits, leaving the rest with less well paying carriers.
The result is the sort of unrest that thousands of frustrated passengers have just had to endure during a pilots’ strike at the Spanish national carrier, Iberia. It is hard not to feel some sympathy with flyers whose pay and pensions are markedly out of kilter with those elsewhere in Europe, as well as the Middle East and the United States.
The problem is that not all airlines are profitable. They have to carry immense expenses, in fuel, cost of aircraft and their maintenance, landing charges and a myriad of support services, before they even start thinking about paying their cabin and flight crews. With the current global economic downturn, filling empty seats on airliners is becoming increasingly hard. Competition is driving down ticket prices and with that, the incomes of carriers. The laws of the market prevail.
But the laws of the market cannot be allowed to dominate when it comes to the question of safety. If carriers find themselves under financial pressure, there will inevitably be economic pressures to cut costs. Though airline regulators around the world are always on the alert for any evidence of impaired safety levels, a risk remains.
In the long run, airline pilots are a doomed breed. Already airliners can largely fly themselves. Automatic landings and takeoffs are standard at most major airports, which have the equipment to handle them. The pilot and co-pilot are only there as a human backup to the onboard computers. There is already talk of doing away with the co-pilot on some aircraft types. In time, the pilot too could go, to be replaced if necessary by a single pilot on the ground, monitoring a dozen or so aircraft, the flying of any one of which he could take over remotely. But until then the tension between pilot pay and carrier finances is likely to continue.
