Airline industry troubles take toll on workers with ‘jet fuel in their veins’
OCEANSIDE, New York: Workers at many airlines have taken huge pay cuts in recent years, and they have watched 100,000 or so of their colleagues lose their jobs.
But for many workers, the financial troubles of the industry have taken another toll: a sense of love lost for the business.
Some airline mechanics, for example, are fond of saying that they have jet fuel in their veins. For the Schalk family of Oceanside, New York, it even coursed through two generations. Until recently.
Charlie Schalk, now 75, was training as a bank teller when he enlisted in the Air Force in 1951 and was sent to Newfoundland and taught to fix planes. He became smitten with the DC-3s he was overhauling. After the service, he fell for the Boeing 707 while working at Pan Am.
“Ill never forget the day that screaming giant came rolling in,” Schalk said. “She was beautiful.”
His three sons inherited his love of planes, and became airline mechanics, too.
But as they approached middle age, the industry went into its steep downturn, and the joy they felt fixing planes turned to anger over the pay cuts, lost jobs and suddenly risky pensions. The brothers make between $60,000 and $75,000 a year. Each of them vowed to start a new career.
“Theres no fun anymore,” said Glenn Schalk, 53, the oldest brother. He blames outsourcing of some other work by his employer, British Airways, for his sense of insecurity about his job fixing planes at John F. Kennedy International Airport near Oceanside.
He started his own business after hours, and watched his brothers take steps to start new careers, too. Then something unexpected happened: The romance of work, something the Schalks long thought was tied exclusively to fixing big jetliners, began to return.
“Its fun. I cant wait to get up in the morning and work in my business,” Glenn Schalk said.
He sells commemorative plaques and trophies to companies, municipal agencies and professional sports teams.
And he now makes more from the business, DS Incorporated, than from his airline job, from which he hopes to retire next year.
“Im into being a businessman,” he said. “I like the respect.”
To be sure, many other airline workers have not managed the transition to other careers as well as the Schalks.
Many of those laid off landed in poorer-paying jobs. And those who have kept their jobs lead a more stressful life, often doing more work for lower pay, and with stripped-down retirement benefits.
Workers in the U.S. automobile industry, many of them car junkies, are going through the same painful process - a wrenching separation from an industry that employed generations of families.
The ranks of budding entrepreneurs among airline workers include Charles Foulkes, 40, who speaks five languages and has a graduate degree from Northwestern University. “Im not an underachiever,” he said.
Still, Foulkes joined American Airlines in 1990 as a flight attendant and expected that to be his career. After his pay was cut in 2003, Foulkes, who lives in Chicago, signed up for cooking school, then baking school.
The business he started, Crust Bread, sells naturally unleavened loaves for $4 to $10 at gourmet shops and now accounts for about one-third of his income. He is trying to expand and now sees his airline work in a slightly different light. “I want to do something more than fly around the world and serve Cokes,” he said.
Many airline employees start businesses that cater to fellow workers. Linda Pinka, a flight attendant at Southwest Airlines for 35 years, makes airline-themed jewelry. She estimated that about half the flight attendants she knew had a second source of income.
Richard Krutenat, a regional jet pilot for American Airlines, runs a business, DFWcrewhouse.com, which matches landlords with pilots and flight attendants who need to rent a place to sleep near Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
Krutenat, 36, started the business in 2002 to supplement his airline salary, which is now $80,000 a year. He has since been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug.
He bought a house of his own to rent out and more recently has been mulling how to attract investors to develop dormitory-style housing: “Ive tinkered with the idea of marketing it big time.”
Pilots and flight attendants have more flexible schedules, which has always allowed them to work side jobs and start businesses. But as industry problems worsened, other airline workers found ways to moonlight.
“When I started it was just a handful of guys” working side jobs, said Brad Mueller, a crew chief who for 18 years has worked at the giant American Airlines maintenance base in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which employs about 7,000 people. Now, he estimated, close to 20 percent of the workers have outside jobs.
