I'll start off.
As somebody who represents the pilots you're talking about, there are some good days. I would submit to you that there's no better office in the world than the flight deck of an aircraft, but that's once you're up in the air and you're going. It's all the other stuff, and Mark outlined a good chunk of it. I didn't get into that; I knew that other witnesses were going to talk about it.
However, there are some challenges. It is not the profession that the general public likes to think it is, this glamorous job where you're making all kinds of money and laying over for 24 hours in an exotic city. That is not the case. It may have been in the seventies, but it's not like that anymore.
When young people are looking at a career choice, they look at the whole picture—the compensation package, the hours of work. When they compare it to other jobs out there, no longer is the pilot profession up there. It's down here, like everything else.
What I was submitting as an industry—and perhaps the government could help point the industry in this direction—is to change our pay models. The pay model we have right now is based on a seniority system, and Mark outlined this as well. If your company happens to go out of business and you have to start all over again and you have 20 years in the business, you're going back to year-one pay. There's no other industry that does that.
There's no predictability in our industry. There's no stability. We liken parents spending $100,000 for their child to take flight training as buying a $100,000 lottery ticket. They have no idea if there's going to be a return on the investment.
These are some of the things we wanted to outline to make sure that everybody is fully aware that this industry, the pilot profession, is not what it used to be.