A very old aviation aphorism holds that the airline pilot’s life is ordered on “sex, salary, and seniority—not necessarily in that order!” I’m not going to touch the first topic with a 10-foot pole, and both the lower and upper end of airline salaries are pretty well known. It is the seniority system that deserves a closer look, for despite being one of the defining features of a piloting career, it is a unique institution that seems rather foreign to most modern working Americans.
As mentioned in my last video, virtually all airline pilots in the United States are unionized, and those who aren’t work under rather union-like conditions. Beyond the airlines, many of the larger fractional, charter, and cargo companies have also chosen to use seniority for the purposes of aircraft assignment, upgrade, and scheduling.
