How many contractors does it take to run Boeing?
Or, Why shouldn’t Boeing be the gold standard of flight training?

By Tom McCarty, SPEEA President

I wish these were rhetorical questions but unfortunately – they are not. I have been sitting in on the negotiations between our SPEEA-Airplane Manufacturing Pilots Association (AMPA) pilots and The Boeing Company. I think this is one of the most complex negotiations SPEEA has ever undertaken. I am asking for your patience while I explain what is going on. These negotiations are important to all of us, but they are critical to the simulator instructor pilots who are losing their jobs. Soon many, if not all, of the pilots SPEEA represents may be gone.

This is the first negotiation with Boeing since AMPA joined SPEEA. To make it more complicated, this is the first contract negotiation for the simulator instructor pilots and safety, standards and technical pilots who voted to become SPEEA-represented last year. Now the final twist, Boeing has announced that all the full-motion simulators will move from the Longacres facility in Renton to Miami. The simulator instructor pilots currently working at Longacres will not be offered jobs as simulator instructors at the Miami facility. This means the current round of negotiations is for both a new contract and “effects bargaining.” This effects bargaining is negotiations with Boeing to mitigate the effects of job loss due to the relocation of the flight simulators to Miami. If your question is: Won’t one finish before the other is started, the answer is yes, or maybe, but I’m not sure which one.

Any discussion of The Boeing Company's Flight Crew Training (FCT) organization should begin in 1958, with the introduction and delivery of the first Boeing 707's to commercial airline customers like Pan American. During these early days of commercial jet operations, pilots and flight engineers who worked for Boeing's flight-test organization conducted crew training for Boeing airline customers.

A Boeing flight test pilot like Harley Beard and a flight test flight engineer like Jim Mathison would be assigned to conduct some "crew training" as part of the delivery sequence for a particular customer. Example, as part of the flight test sequence during the airline customer acceptance of a new B-707, the Boeing test pilot and flight engineer would impart instruction to the customer airline acceptance crew as to how the airplane should be operated. The airline's pilot(s) and flight engineer(s) would be allowed the opportunity to fly the airplane and make some instrument approaches and landings, most likely at Boeing Field in Seattle. Note: the Grant County--Moses Lake airport was still the Strategic Air Command's Larson AFB in those days and generally not available for civilian test and training flights.