Free When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner Page A

Polite to Do So)
(BY “CAPTAIN STEVE”)
    Captain Steve is a seasoned international pilot for a major U.S. carrier and a friend of Freakonomics. (Given the sensitivity of what he writes, he prefers anonymity.) This post was published on June 24, 2009, six months after the “The Miracle on the Hudson,” in which Captain Chesley Sullenberger safely landed an Airbus A320-200 in the Hudson River. Both the plane’s engines had failed, due to a bird strike, shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in New York.
    After reading some of the excerpts of Captain Sullenberger’s various speeches, especially those of a few weeks ago with the National Transportation Safety Board, I would like to add my editorial.
    Captain Sullenberger has been a class act all the way. He’s not been petty, pious, or egotistical. He is, however, like most of the captains I know and, more broadly, most of the pilots I know. Why? He doesn’t need to be otherwise. When someone has accomplished what he and the scores of men and women like him have accomplished, why do we need to boast?
    He implies that what he did while serving as the “skipper” of US Airways flight 1549 was simply his job. He is being as honest and accurate as he can be: “Please, no fanfare, no applause, just doing my job.” But what he has alsoalluded to in some of his speeches is that it has taken years, even decades, to prepare himself for that one single “lifetime event” of guiding his jet into the safe, smooth landing on the Hudson River.
    What he is not saying is this:
    We, the airline pilots, are facing a losing battle in the PR department. You believe that we make huge salaries and are treated like royalty. Pure fiction. Why have we been losing this battle for such a long time? Simple. Because most of us are like “Sully”; we don’t want applause or fanfare for doing what we are trained to do. However, we do realize that we should be fairly compensated for what we have achieved to get this job and what we continue to do on a daily basis to keep it. This backlash of pilot-bashing is building to a boiling point.
    Regional carriers, like the Colgan Airlines flight in Buffalo [which crashed, killing all forty-nine aboard], employ the lowest-bidder pilots. No offense to them; this is not personal. It is the system that is at fault. Money and profits at all cost.
    Airline history lesson 101: it used to be, up until the mid 1980s, that a young pilot would be hired on at a major carrier, become a flight engineer (FE), and then spend a few years managing the systems of the older-generation airplanes. But he or she was learning all the while. These new “pilots” sat in the FE seat and did their job, all the while observing the “pilots” doing the flying, day in and day out.
    The FEs learned from the seasoned pilots about thereal world of flying into the O’Hares and LaGuardias. They learned decision making, delegation, and the reality of “captain’s final authority” as confirmed in the law. When they got the chance to upgrade, they became a copilot. The copilot’s duty was to assist the captain in flying; but even during their time as the new copilot, they had the luxury of the FE looking over their shoulders—i.e., more learning. This three-man-crew concept, now a fond memory in the domestic markets but used predominately in international flying, was considered one more layer of protection.
    But it’s gone. Now domestic flying is being shifted to the regional carriers, like Colgan, American Eagle, Comair, and Mesa, to name a few. These consist of the lowest bidders and the newest pilots flying into the harshest of environments. The airline management teams would say that it works and that this is routine flying. I beg to differ.
    Analogy: you are told you need a quadruple bypass. Now you search the Internet for the cheapest price you can get, and you rush to schedule the operation because there are only two dates that you can get that cheap rate.
    Do any