Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

What can a young person planning a career expect to earn as a pilot? Professional Pilot answers this question, at least retrospectively, every year. The 2016 survey is out.

Involvement with turboprops is bad. The manager of a corporate aviation department, responsible for the hiring of pilots, supervising $400,000 engine overhauls, etc., earns on average about $70,000 per year, as does the chief pilot. A captain responsible for the lives of up to 10 passengers clocks in at about $60,000 per year. Being a unionized regional airline turboprop captain can boost this up to $85,000 to $100,000 per year.

Jets in the corporate world result in higher pay. The flight department manager involved with midsize jets will earn about $120,000 per year, supervising a chief pilot at $105,000 per year, captains at $95,000 per year, and first officers at $55,000 per year.

Midsize jet charter pilots earn about 25 percent less and are presumably away from home more than a corporate jet pilot with a home base and executives who want to return to it.

Flying an epic-size corporate jet internationally for a huge company can pay as much as $150,000 per year, but there are a lot of Cessna Citations for every Gulfstream G650.

Regional jet captains harvest union wages of about $90,000 per year, with the right-seat pilot earning $45,000 per year. The real money is in major airlines. A 10th year captain on the smallest aircraft in the fleet ears a base annual salary of $205,000 at Delta, $225,000 at Fedex, and $190,000 at JetBlue. They can work their way up to $281,000 at American and $275,000 at Fedex on the largest jets. These numbers don’t include flying hours beyond 960 per year, per diem rates, and other bonuses that would typically add at least $25,000 per year.

Remember that the airline salaries are tainted by sample bias. Pilots who end up at airlines that don’t grow can upgrade to captain only very slowly. By union rules, pilots who end up at airlines that go bust have to start over as the lowest-seniority first officer at a new airline.

The helicopter world is arguably more fun and typically involves fewer hours in the seat (if only because the helicopter runs out of gas after 2-3 hours!). The corporate flight department managers earn $80-125,000 per year depending on helicopter size while the chief pilots and captains are at $80,000 to $120,000 per year. Cut those numbers by 30 percent in the charter world. Sikorsky (S-76 or S-92) is what you want to fly for maximum earnings, but most of those jobs may be snapped up by military veterans.] Police helicopter pilots can earn over $100,000 per year and they don’t even need an FAA pilot certificate, but typically those jobs are restricted to people who are already police officers. Offshore (oil rig transport) Sikorsky captains can earn just over $100,000 per year. News helicopter flying pays less than corporate: $70,000 per year on average. Medevac helicopter pilots don’t fly much so the per-hour rate is high but the annual salary averages only about $80,000 per year, which is not a great return on the training investment (but perhaps there is a lot of satisfaction from helping people?). The hardest helicopter jobs, in logging and construction, pay less than the easiest (flying executives around in Sikorsky S-76s), about $80,000 per year.

[From this chapter on Massachusetts family law:

“There are a lot of women collecting child support from more than one man,” Nissenbaum noted. “I remember one enterprising young lady who worked as a waitress at Boston’s Logan airport. She targeted three airline pilots, had a child by each of them, and back then was collecting $25,000 in tax-free child support from each pilot. …”

How would the numbers work out today? Assuming that the woman studied airline uniforms and limited her partners to men wearing four stripes, she would be collecting child support from defendants with an earning potential of at least $250,000 per year (attorneys we interviewed said that airline pilots, like deployed members of the U.S. military, are nearly 100-percent guaranteed to lose any custody lawsuit, even if they switch to a 9-5 job, due to the fact that they cannot win under a “historical primary caregiver” standard). Under the Massachusetts child support guidelines she therefore collects $40,000 per year from each pilot and has a tax-free spending power of $120,000 per year for 23 years. It would be typical to obtain court orders for the pilots to pay additional child-related costs such as day care, after-school activities, health insurance, unreimbursed medical expenses, private school tuition, college tuition, etc. Thus she might actually be able to spend $150,000 to $200,000 per year on a household basis. Had she invested $150,000 and four years in college, $100,000 in flight training, spent 25 years living out of a suitcase, and been fortunate enough to work for a successful airline, she would have earned $250,000 pre-tax and been able to spend $160,000 per year after taxes. An important difference is that the waitress/child-support plaintiff could start her earnings at age 18, or younger, while the woman who chooses the pilot career won’t enjoy a comparable spending power until she is 40 or 50 years old. The pilot will also likely be burdened by student loan debt through age 35.]

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I was at Harvard Bookstore the other day and happened upon A is for Activist, a board book for toddlers (video of the author reading). This is a second edition from 2013 and the author seems to have been ahead of his (“her” by now? T is for “trans” according to the book) time. F is for Feminist, but oddly C is not therefore for Child Support nor is L for Litigation. C is in fact for “Co-op” (also “Cats”) and L is for “LGBTQ”.

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When you combine the treacly sentimentality of Facebook with a Hallmark Holiday such as Father’s Day one’s literary expectations must be set low. Nonetheless, I found something interesting in an MIT friend’s feed:

When I was born, sophisticated families fed their babies with formula, instead of nursing. And my father, who was not a control freak by any means, somehow made it his job to prepare my formula each and every day because he trusted no one else to do it, including my mother or our housekeeper. Now I realize that lack of trust might sound a bit mean, but you must understand that my mother never cooked a meal in her life, and was quite willfully perplexed in the kitchen. When my father died, she lost nearly 40 lbs in the following months, because she had no idea how to prepare food. My dad had cooked for her the prior quarter century and was such a good cook, she had no reason to learn.

Anyway, back to when I was an infant, my father insisted on preparing my formula daily, despite his busy schedule. He worked for General Electric at the time, and occasionally would have to fly from Detroit to Schenectady for a multi-day trip. And when he did, he had GE fly him back home every night and out every morning, just so he could prepare my formula. This went on for well over a year. Fortunately, my father was well-liked and highly valued, so he got away with costing his company extra money (sorry shareholders!)–just so he could be a good dad.

[What period of American life are we talking about? She was born in 1961.]

Readers: What’s the best thing that you saw yesterday on Facebook related to Father’s Day? Please cut and paste into the comments!

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“Where More Women Are on Boards, Executive Pay Is Higher” (nytimes) says that public company CEOs can boost their pay (i.e., their stealing from shareholders) by putting women on their boards.

Certainly it seems likely that through a combination of pressure and demographic shifts there will be an increasing percentage of public company board members who identify as women. Should we expect this pay boost for in-house looters to be persistent?

[Separately, like other reports that count up men versus women, I’m not sure how this article makes sense in an age where cisgender-normative prejudice is frowned upon. How can anyone know what the gender composition of a corporate board is given that people might change their gender ID tomorrow morning and/or might have changed it some months ago but without changing names?]

Related:

• Economic Recovery Plan for the U.S. (November 2008 document suggesting shareholder-driven corporate governance)

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“Afghan Lovers Begin an Asylum Odyssey in New York” is about two would-be legal immigrants who are currently in New York City: “Even if they win asylum in the United States, both are illiterate, with little experience living or working beyond the potato fields of their home in Bamian Province.”

The same newspaper runs stories just about every week about excessive income inequality in New York City, i.e., expressing shock that a Goldman Sachs partner earns more than someone who is illiterate.

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Stormy Peters, with whom I have indirectly worked by (slightly) helping KidsOnComputers.org, what may have seemed like an anodyne article on how a woman might be able to attend a tech-related conference without “feeling harassed”. She titled this “Events are not cesspools of harassment.” Publication led to… well, a cesspool of harassment being dumped on Peters’s head by commenters on the article’s page and on Twitter. (I would hesitate to say “female commenters” in our transgender age, but most had names such as Holly, Renee, Sarah and other traditionally female monikers.)

Instead of a craven apology for her ThoughtCrime, Peters followed this up with an ironic summary and analysis of the criticism. Commenters were predictably even more enraged by this one, e.g., Holly Wood’s “I see you’re in a fairly lofty position at your company. Are you a supervisor of some kind? While I know I’m wildly outside your area of expertise, I would not ever consider working for you.”

Peters finally throws up her hands and tells the commenters to, if they have such great ideas, write them up in long form.

[It is curious to me that there are women who like to go to conferences but don’t like working in tech because of harassment and don’t like tech conferences. Why wouldn’t they quit to work in some other field? Or if they are drawn to conferences per se why wouldn’t they go to a dermatology or radiology conference in Boston, have sex with a drunk physician, and then harvest $100,000 per year tax-free for 23 years under the Massachusetts child support guidelines or, if not interested in children, sell the abortion? The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the median web developer, a typical “tech” job, pays a pre-tax $65,000 per year (occupational outlook handbook). Is that a high enough rate of pay to compensate for all the pain and suffering these commenters say that they are enduring?]

I asked a software engineer who currently identifies as a woman what would happen if a man had written an article with the same text as Stormy Peters’s original. “He would have been fired immediately,” she responded.

[Not very related: I asked a federal government worker what would have happened to him if he had set up a personal email server to use for official business, Hillary Clinton-style. “I would have been fired immediately,” he responded.]

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I am in love with Sony APS-C mirrorless cameras for their image quality (dynamic range so much better than anything from Canon), their compact size, and the back-saving flip-up rear LCD. I started with the NEX-6, moved to the A6000, and now have the A6300. The worst thing about the camera compared to a trusty Canon EOS body has always been the autofocus. Sony’s response to this is “Just give us $1000 for the new model, which has the best autofocus imaginable.” After playing around with the “green idiot mode,” however, I am shocked at the number of out-of-focus images. This is not a question of picking the wrong part of the scene but of an image in which literally nothing is in focus, perhaps due to “release priority” rather than “AF priority” (manually settable but the setting may not affect behavior in green idiot mode) combined with a generally inferior ability to autofocus.

Any readers with this camera? Does the purported Emperor of Autofocus actually have no clothes?

 

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I talked to a high-end trusts, estates, and foundation lawyer. I asked him if there was any difference in setting up foundations in various U.S. states. He said “Delaware is kind of the go-to place, but South Dakota is becoming more popular because of the professional trustees there offering lower fees.” He said to avoid Florida. “Most states it is the Attorney General who is responsible for supervising foundations and trusts, but in Florida it is the Department of Agriculture and they can be very aggressive due to the potential for taking advantage of the elderly.” Any other tips? “Stay out of California and New York. Their tax departments are like third world countries’.”

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I know that North Carolina is the State of Hate (TM) while Massachusetts is all about love, but I went for my annual workout and found this sign at the Boston Sports Club in Waltham:

How is this different from the North Carolina law that marks the Ignorant Southerners as haters? (And, as is well-established, haters are going to hate.)

One of my Facebook friends resolved the apparent contradiction by saying that the Massachusetts lovers who put up the sign meant to write “gender” rather than the biological or birth certificate-derived “sex.” Massachusetts lovers and North Carolina haters have more or less the same laws regarding amending the sex designation on a birth certificate. If we put up this sign are we actually distinguishable from the haters of North Carolina?

[Separately, will they have to take down this sign if the new transgender bill becomes law? (The governor says that it will.)]

Related:

• TIME article on how Massachusetts was the first (1887) to insist, by law, on the separation of the sexes in bathrooms.

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One corner of American society where regulators and lawyers do about 10 times as much work, measured in dollars, as primary producers: aircraft operations from places other than public airports.

What has typically happened in Massachusetts is that a property owner will get approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to land an airplane or helicopter. The FAA looks at the question of safety and, to a lesser extent, noise and impact on neighbors. Then neighbors or town officials look at the gleaming aircraft in someone’s backyard and try to shut down operations via zoning laws.

After at least four years of litigation, the question seems to have been resolved by a May 2016 decision of the Appeals Court in Hanlon v. Town of Sheffield (15-P-799). Essentially the holding seems to be that the town has to seek approval from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s aeronautics division prior to shutting down someone’s FAA-approved operation.

Related

• We can get stuff done in Massachusetts… it just takes 30 years (new runway at Logan)
• Stamford, Connecticut police ticket a medevac helicopter pilot for landing at a hospital

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