More Than Points

Fellow road warrior, Josh, recently pointed me towards this interesting page on FltOps.com.  It aggregates annual pay based on guaranteed pilot hours for the major airlines.

Josh comments, "The article from which I pulled this link stated that the pilot involved in a regional airline crash last year (maybe it was the Buffalo flight) was making around $16K per year."

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Another road warrior commented, "…if you drop down to the smaller regionals (American Eagle, Mesa, Colgan, Wisconsin), it can get really ugly where a first year co-pilot on a smaller craft is only at $20 per hour flown (only guaranteed 75 hours/month) with a $1.40/hour per diem for time away.
 
I have a friend who flies for Colgan who would have qualified for food stamps in his first year (if he wasn’t married to a doctor)."

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I’m not sure you can draw any conclusions on this information alone but it does give some insights into how much (or little) a pilot makes depending on their experience and plane size.  Unless I’m mistaken, many of the recent airline crashes involved smaller planes and inexperienced pilots.

Does knowing the pay scale change how you think about flying on certain flights?