Buying Safety....$$$$$?

[TeePeeCreeper]

The mileage based pay scheme has always made me a bit nervous...

Lucky for some such as myself, I get paid per flight hour. I go missed and come back to base? No worries I still get paid!

Just the other day, I saw one of our junior pilots get some serious flack from the DFO and CP for "making it in" when the rest of his co-workers turned back and told him to fly back after we all missed.

This company has yet to have "called me in" for a "chat" after going missed.... Sorta nice to have a management team who actually gives a damn about your being able to see your kids and wife at the end of the day...

[Brown Bear]

Not everybody has common sense to know when to say "NO" and as this thread implies, we're trying to "buy" safe here. No more base/miles.

If they dont have enough common sense to say NO, then, changing the pay scheme isn't going to change that. That was a hiring mistake, and, no amount of fussing with the pay structure is going to fix that problem. You cannot cure all problems by simply throwing money at them, just ask your federal and/or local politicians how well that works.

When it comes to pay structure, what matters is, where the final numbers tally up, and wether or not that is a liveable amount. If it's below average, then when hiring time comes, you will have a pool of resumes to choose from, which represents essentially the dregs of the industry. If it's substantially above the average, you will end up with a much deeper pool of resumes to choose from at hiring time. Supply, demand, and the grapevine will look after that for you. If you have small airplanes, then you wont be inundated with resumes from folks blinded by 'big shiny aluminum'.

But in the end, if you want a safe operation, the key is, picking and choosing from the candidates, and, ensure you DONT end up with that person who doesn't have the common sense to say NO, driving your airplanes. It really wont matter how much money you throw at the problem after the fact, if you have chosen the wrong staff, you wont get the desired end result. And they key to having a depth of candidate pool, is not the method of calculating the pay scale, it's how the final numbers tally up against the overall averages.

So now tell us honestly doc, which would you rather have for driving that KingAir? $6K monthly salary, or, a flat buck a mile (no base), based solely on trips completed ? And, if you were on the buck a mile pay scale, would that be enough to co-erce you to sneak a hundred feet lower trying to 'get in' today ?

By removing milage from the equation, you have removed a "temptation" to say "yes" when "NO" would be the correct answer.
And, if you knew how little Doc flies, you'd have to just know, he'd go for the salary.
But people like yourself, myself, Doc and a few others aren't your "target" audience here. We're the choir. It's the young ones we want to remove "temptation" from. Us old buzzards are too chicken in our ways to risk life, limb, licence and what have you, for a few extra cents a mile!