“being a master” is a subjective measurement. Having the license, and thus being legally qualified, is an objective measurement.
And major airlines choose to require higher time to hire, but they don’t have to. The 1501hour ATP is legally licensed to do that job. And many do it safely with that or fewer hours (military, foreign airlines) everyday. Colgan Air crash caused the stupid kneejerk reaction by congress to require an ATP for the right seat too.
We can debate that 1500 hours doesn’t mean the person has enough experience for left seat of an airline and 6years for master/chief isn’t enough to “be a master”, but the legal requirements are met. And at some point in time, some group of people agreed this was good enough.
Don’t know if that’s the right metric, the quality of feedback likely is more important.
Consider that a child typically can learn to ride a bicycle in about an hour or so. Or learning to play catch or other various skill in two dimensions.
In those cases feedback is immediate. Ship handling takes longer to learn than boat handling in part because the quality of feedback is better in the case of the smaller craft.
This is wrt MS flight simulator.
Completing Flight Training takes roughly 30-40 minutes, and by the time you’re done, you should feel confident enough to fly around the world on your own.
Not directly relevant to real world piloting but indicates roughly about how long it takes a person to learn to maneuver in a simulated three dimensional space.
Neither one is that difficult if that’s where your desire, focus, and training reside. If you think either is difficult, you are in the wrong line of work. Technical skills are not the most important; axes are of little consequence in the larger picture. Yes, you can refute that with a physics argument - been in a 172 several times and there are stark differences with my center console. But, the most important skill is understanding data to make the right decisions, not where your angle of attack or pitch is appropriate. That’s class 101 stuff. When your ass is in a crack and the stress is out of the roof, the demeanor and decisions you make at that point are indistinguishable in terms of human factors. But, the most important decisions are the ones that would have prevented that situation. (insert experience, procedures, etc.). I would argue as Johnny Dollar mentioned that the challenges are fairly similar. However, compensation is dictated by what the market says your skillset/work is worth, it has very little to do with one’s relative perception of difficulty.
Circling back to OP’s Point, if you were to make the correlation to the international feet, my trusty googling would indicate an average Filipino airline pilot makes 36% more than an average Filipino captain. Once I actually google the average airline salary, I think 200k is a lot better average than 300k, and 200k is a lot less than 35% more what an American captain makes. Rather than say mariners are making more than they should, senior officers in the airline industry and maritime industry are both probably doing fine. Shoot, most officers are probably doing fine.
Actually all airplanes glide, some better than others. The relevant number is glide ratio, how many feet forward for every foot of altitude lost. A Cessna 172 is about 6:1, a basic glider is maybe 20-25:1, and a really good glider is over 60:1.
Modern passenger jets actually glide pretty well, they usually do better than 20:1, thus putting them right up there with the cheaper gliders. That brings up two other numbers that matter, sink and best glide speed. Jets are going quite fast while gliding, so landing one engine out means finding a big field to land it in. Sink rate is the other big deal, to stay aloft requites your sink rate (feet per minute going down) to be less than the rate the air is rising (feet per minute going up). If you work the geometry, a plane with a lower glide ratio but lower glide speed can stay aloft when a plane with a better glide ratio but higher glide speed is not staying up. Thus the noted lack of 737s ridge soaring up and down the Appalachians
I have a brother who flies Boeing for a cargo company. The way the pilots look at it is if wages had kept up with what they were in the 1950’s and 60’s they should be making half a mil a year, at least. Same for sailing, when I started as a 3rd Mate in the mid-70’s I made double my wife’s teacher salary. When she retired she made more than a 3rd’s wage and in line with a second mate solely through better contracts and yearly increments. In the meantime, we have had serious crew reductions and an explosion of regulation which we have to deal with. All that did not result in better pay for the increased work load or responsibility.
Only been at this for 20 years and boy do I wish I could roll the clock back to those days. The people who have been at it longer must really feel this more than me. It is never ending…
The airline pays a small fortune to train pilots no matter what the source of new hires.
Aside from the physical manipulation of controls very little military training and mindset transfers well into civil aviation and a large part of airline training is demilitarizing zoomie pilots.
Write a letter to your congress critter and complain about Kings Point training military pilots.
The airlines would have to cut their fleets by about 2/3s or more if they relied on ex-mil pilots. It also saves the airlines exactly 0 dollars, no matter where they come from the training they have up to that point has been paid for by someone else.
I have a brother who flies for a major cargo carrier. He got his start flying my Father’s Cessna and then working for a flight training school. He is a Captain on 757/767 aircraft and, yes, he does make more money that I did sailing Captain of a Lake Freighter, BUT his pension is slim, medical not as good, and schedules can be horrible. The problem is that wages for airplane pilots have eroded over the years as have the real wages for seafarers. Ship Pilots are doing very nicely now but for how long will that continue. Based on inflation that 757 pilot should be making as much as a 707 pilot in the 60’s and that would be about $500K a year. My pay as 3rd mate in the 70’s was double my wife’s teacher salary but by her retirement she was making 2nd Mate’s wages, and all she added was time and experience, no further education. I believe there is a big trend that professional people, technical people and operators who aren’t CEO’s are seeing their real wages fall as either pay or benefits or both have not kept pace.
My ex-wife was making 2/M wages as a nurse in the early 2000s…4 days on/3 off, 3 days on/4 off and had excellent benefits…mariner wages are not keeping pace.
Yeah but unions still had a lot of influence then. Even if you worked for a non-union company they would try and offer competitive compensation, just to keep the unions out. Which was understandable as union companies paid into a union pension plan which the company could not use as an asset. They hated that but many mariners understood the pension was portable under the union and was worth working for a little less money. Now? Mariners are like Uber gig workers.
I would guess that was before the shootout of 1984 where the MM&P was run off the tankers and the wages (total compensation) dropped about 40%. There was another draconian pay cut of 20% in 1994.
