"Dan Luke" wrote
Southwest is a very special case. It's the child of a brilliant
manager/founder.

Nothing brilliant about it. Southwest is an actual business, and run
as such - the goal being to make a profit. Most airlines are run more
like model railroads - the goal being to be able to get more and
bigger stuff. Southwest is pretty much the Greyhound of the air. I
avoid them like the plague - no direct flights anywhere, cattle-call
boarding, no possibility of an upgrade to first class because they
don't have it, full flights, no food. Of course I'm not paying for my
ticket, either. Southwest is not targeted at getting the people on
corporate expense accounts - it's targeted at gettting the people who
will use alternate transportation (most often drive) unless the price
is right. They are the Greyhound of the air.

Such individuals are rare - vanishingly scarce in
publicly traded corporations.

Does seem to be the case, doesn't it...

Your point is valid, though: management likes to blame unions for
competitive disadvantages, but management agreed to those contracts.
Often this is a case of throwing money at unhappy people because it's
easier than dealing imaginatively with the workforce.

Imagination doesn't cut it - you need money. The Southwest pilots I
know are often unemployable elsewhere - in fact, every Southwest pilot
I know has crashed at least one airplane. Small sample, but still...
Does that make me concerned about the safety of flying Southwest? Not
in the least. As one of them put it, there are so many rules and
procedures in place, it just doesn't matter.

Historically, airline pilot salaries were high because it DID matter.
In the age of the piston airliners and the steam gauge cockpits, when
airliners flew in the weather rather than above it, pilot skill and
experience mattered a lot. It was important to attract the best
through a winnowing process, where the winnowing only killed a few
people at a time rather than dozens or hundreds. That's no longer
important.

My bet is that is stabilizes right around $100K in today's dollars for
major airline captains, and the quality of the pilots (as measured in
accident rate) will not change.

I'll bet you lunch at Carl's that it will be ~$75K in today's dollars in
10 years. Hope I can still fly in to collect.

You're on.

Michael