Pilot and Flight Attendant Pay

July 2024

Social media seems to blow up now and then with either pilots and/or flight attendants or people who fly a lot or occasionally people with a passing and incomplete interest in labor right about pilot and flight attendant pay.

At most (all?) US airlines pilot and flight attendant pay is based on block flight hour. Which for simplicity we’ll describe as the time you see published on your itinerary. If it’s published as 3 hours and 10 minutes then at a minimum your flight crew will be paid that amount. That’s not entirely true, since the block time for crews may be different for a variety of reasons, but it’s the time published to the flight crew on their schedule and it’s from when the plane leaves the gate until it arrives at the destination gate. The minimum they will be paid is the block time, and most airlines if they exceed the published block time they will get paid the actual block time.

Which means the flight crew is not paid for any of the time doing preflight checks, for boarding passengers, for preparing the aircraft, loading flight plans etc. Anything that is being done before the official departure time is being done for free. If your crew is changing planes to work another flight the entire time from the arrival at one gate until the departure at another gate is worked for free. This time may be substantial, crews may be cooling their heels for multiple hours waiting for a next flight, and that’s assuming there are no weather delays.

Flight crew pay is a complicated process, and any explanation is going to be specific to one airline and every other airline is going to be different in small and large ways. Suffice it to say that flight crew are only paid for the time they are operating the flight. Why that is I have been unable to discover, it seems to have always been that way. It’s likely some kind of hangover from the railway or maritime contracts.

That time is paid at an hourly rate.

The alternative idea is that flight crew should be paid for their entire time on duty, which is to say the time between when they “clock in” at the airport for the start of their duty day to the time they “clock off” at the end of their day. Most airlines don’t require people to actually clock-in and out, but they publish your start duty time and your expected end duty time, although the actual end is normally some number of minutes after your last flight has arrived. So being paid for duty time would include significantly more hours.

People love this idea. Flight crews shouldn’t be working for free, they should be paid for the time they are working, and to be honest who doesn’t think that’s a great idea. Well airline management for one.

Don’t get me wrong, if the unions want it bad enough the airlines will figure it out, but you can rest assured that any new pay scheme is going to be cost neutral to the airline, or if they act as they normally act, and since this is something the union wants, they’ll want to extract some cost savings.

The airlines know EXACTLY how many duty hours they would have to pay flight crew for, because they track that duty time since they pay their crew per-diem (a few dollars an hour) for all their duty time. So they know that if the current system is paying $60 an hour for block time and they know that crews work 3 times as many hours in duty time for each block hour then in the best case scenario (for flight crew) they are going to be offered $20 an hour, and more likely $19.50. There is no free lunch.

Is that better for flight crews? I don’t know, it’s not like they get more money, it’s just accounted for differently.