Commuter Pilot’s Life Defies Glamorous Stereotype
This article was reported by David M. Halbfinger, Matthew L. Wald and Christopher Drew, and written by Mr. Halbfinger.
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Matthew Holst for The New York Times
Neil A. Weston lives in Dubuque, Iowa, but his base of operations is Indianapolis.
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Pilot Earnings at Regional Airlines
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Low Wages, Long Commutes

Rick Friedman for The New York Times
Alex Lapointe, a co-pilot for a regional carrier, says he often flies on too little sleep.
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Alex Lapointe, a 25-year-old co-pilot for a regional airline, says he routinely lifts off knowing he has gotten less sleep than he needs. And once or twice a week, he says, he sees the captain next to him struggling to stay alert.
Neil A. Weston, also 25, went $100,000 into debt to train for a co-pilot’s job that pays him $25,000 annually. He carries sandwiches in a cooler from his home in Dubuque, Iowa, bought his first uniform for $400, and holds out hope of tripling his salary by moving into the captain’s seat, then up to a major carrier. Assuming, that is, the majors start hiring again.
Capt. Paul Nietz, 58, who recently retired from a regional airline, said his schedule wore him down and cost him three marriages. His workweek typically began with a 2:30 a.m. wake-up in northern Michigan and a 6 a.m. flight to his Chicago home bases. There, he would wait for his first assignment, a noon departure.
By the time he parked his aircraft at the last gate of the night, he was exhausted. But he would be due back at work eight hours and 15 minutes later. “At the very most, if you’re the kind of person that could walk into a hotel room, strip and lay down, you might get four and a half hours of sleep,” he said. “And I was very senior. I was one of the fortunate guys.”
The National Transportation Safety Board’s inquiry into the Feb. 12 crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 outside Buffalo has highlighted the operations of the nation’s regional airlines, a sector of the aviation industry that has grown to account for half the country’s airline flights and a quarter of its passengers.
The details of that world have surprised many Americans — the strikingly low pay for new pilots; the rigors of flying multiple flights, at lower altitudes and thus often in worse weather than pilots on longer routes, while scrambling to get enough sleep; the relative inexperience of pilots at the smaller airlines, whose training standards are the same, but whose skills may not be.
In hearings last week in Washington, witnesses and safety officials raised questions of whether the crew of the plane that crashed, killing all 49 people on board and one on the ground, had been adequately vetted and whether they might have been hampered by, among other factors, fatigue.
But regardless of whether training, fatigue or the cost-cutting that has hit the entire industry are ultimately determined to have contributed to the crash of Flight 3407, interviews with current and former regional pilots make vividly clear the daily challenges they face.
Peek inside a crew lounge at midnight in Chicago, and one could easily find every recliner occupied by an off-duty aviator trying to sleep despite the whine of a janitor’s vacuum cleaner.
In any city with a sizable air hub, a search of Craigslist for the term “crash pad” will turn up listings for rooms for rent, often for $200 a month or less, a short drive from an airport, where a dozen or more pilots, unable to afford hotels, may come and go, barely letting the mattresses cool.
But many regional pilots, paid entry-level wages that are sometimes no better than a job at McDonald’s, can not afford even a crash pad.
“I know a guy who bought a car that barely ran and parked it in the employee lot at his base airport, and slept in his car six or seven times a month,” said Frank R. Graham Jr., a former regional pilot and airline safety director who runs a safety consulting firm in Charlotte, N.C. Pilots for some regional airlines have been known to sleep in the aisles of their planes.
Like the two Flight 3407 pilots, who caught free rides on planes from Florida and Seattle to their flight from Newark to Buffalo, pilots at regional airlines routinely hopscotch across thousands of miles to get to work. Some live with their parents, as the plane’s first officer, Rebecca L. Shaw, did. Others, like Mr. Lapointe, live near former bases of operations that were shut down because an employer went out of business or a route was dropped.
Mr. Lapointe lives in Wakefield, Mass., 15 minutes from his old base in Boston. Since November, he has had to get himself to Kennedy International Airport in New York.
For Captain Nietz, a 27-year veteran, the biggest indignity was flying hungry. Delays were so routine that he seldom left his plane all day long, even “to grab a biscuit.” With food service long discontinued, he said, the only bites to be had were “the occasional peanut — and the airlines charge the crews for bags of peanuts and cheese and crackers.”
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Reporting was contributed by Robbie Brown, Benedict Carey, Ray Rivera, Nate