Mainline carriers pay regional airlines one fixed fee per flight and let those airlines pay flight attendants and everything else out of what is left, a structure carriers proved they could override fast when it was pilots asking, and haven't when it's flight attendants.
Delta Air Lines closed out 2024 with $5 billion in pre-tax income on record full-year revenue, according to the company’s own December quarter and full-year results released January 10, 2025. That is one end of the arrangement. The other end sits at SkyWest, Inc., the regional carrier that flies Delta Connection, United Express, American Eagle and Alaska Airlines routes, which announced on May 7, 2025, that its board had approved a $250 million increase to its existing share repurchase authorization. Two companies, two very different scales, one shared instinct: when the money shows up, it goes to shareholders before it goes to the people working the aisle.
The fixed fee that decides everything
Here is the mechanism that makes both moves possible at once. Under what the industry calls a capacity purchase agreement, a mainline carrier pays a regional airline a fixed rate for operating the aircraft, based mainly on completed flights, flight time, and the number of aircraft under contract, according to SkyWest’s 10-K filed with the SEC for fiscal year 2024. The mainline partner covers fuel and certain direct operating costs separately, according to the filing. Everything else, including flight attendant payroll, mechanic wages, training, and every other cost of running the airline, has to come out of the fixed number that the mainline carrier has already locked in. That number does not move on its own. It moves when the mainline carrier decides it should, and the record shows that decision is made quickly for some jobs and not for others.
Half as much for the same work
That backward math produces a documented gap. AFA-CWA, the union representing flight attendants at regional and mainline carriers, states on its “End Tiers in Aviation” campaign page that regional flight attendants “fly the same routes and do the same work as mainline, but are often paid just half as much.” The union repeated that framing at a demonstration outside the Regional Airline Association’s conference on September 25, 2024, where AFA-CWA International President Sara Nelson said flight attendants at regional airlines “fly the same routes and provide the same service as mainline Flight Attendants. It’s time they get paid like it.” The union’s materials name the beneficiaries directly: executives and shareholders at Delta, United, American and Alaska.
SkyWest’s flight attendants have been trying to close that gap by organizing to join AFA-CWA, and the fight has not been gentle. The Guardian reported on October 2, 2023, that two SkyWest flight attendants were fired on September 13 that year, a move the union alleged was retaliation for their public leadership roles in the organizing campaign, with AFA-CWA demanding their reinstatement. Two years later, the company found $250 million for its own stock.
Pilots got a raise in weeks
Now compare that timeline to what happened when regional carriers ran short on pilots. Mesa Airlines, which flies under contract for American Airlines and United Airlines, raised its entry-level pilot pay 118% to roughly $100 an hour in August 2022, Business Insider reported, chasing talent mainline carriers were pulling away with richer offers. That is an independently contracted regional carrier finding new money inside the same fixed-fee world SkyWest operates in, and finding it in weeks, not years of union organizing. American Airlines moved even faster with its own regional subsidiaries: Envoy Air and Piedmont Airlines, both wholly owned by American, overhauled pay scales that June, with senior line check airmen reaching $427.50 an hour, CNBC reported, a hike American funded directly through August 2024. Delta gave its own mainline pilots a 34% raise over three years, Forbes reported. None of that required years of litigation or a union drive. It required a labor market that scared the people who write the checks.
The number only moves when they want it to
Nothing about a capacity purchase agreement makes flight attendant wages structurally lower than pilot wages. The fixed fee is not a law of physics; it is a number a mainline carrier sets and can change. When pilots got scarce, the money moved. When flight attendants stepped up organizing and mobilizing, at SkyWest and elsewhere, the money moved again, but toward things like $250 million in stock buybacks at SkyWest, and $5 billion in profits banked at Delta. Greed runs in both directions along that fixed-fee: the mainline carrier that decides when the number moves, and the regional carrier that decides what to do with the room it has when the number doesn’t.
The structure was built one contract at a time, mainline carriers setting the price, regional carriers working backward from it. Pilots proved the price can move on short notice when the people setting it want it to. Flight attendants are still working to figure out what it takes to make it work for them, and airline management keeps trying to convince everyone that their entire regional airline scheme is not exploitation.
SOURCES · TAP TO OPEN
- Delta News Hub: Delta Air Lines Announces December Quarter and Full Year 2024 Financial Results (January 10, 2025)
- SkyWest, Inc.: SkyWest, Inc. Announces $250 Million Increase to Share Repurchase Authorization (May 7, 2025)
- AFA-CWA: End Tiers in Aviation
- AFA-CWA: Flight Attendants Demonstrate at Regional Airline Association Meeting to Call Attention to Cruel Two-Tiered Employment in Aviation (September 25, 2024)
- The Guardian: SkyWest Flight Attendants Claim Retaliatory Firings Amid Fight to Unionize (October 2, 2023)
- Business Insider: Mesa Airlines Hikes Entry-Level Pilot Pay by 118% to $100/hr (August 29, 2022)
- CNBC: American Airlines Regional Pilots Get Big Pay Hikes as Competition for Pilots Intensifies (June 13, 2022)
- Forbes: Delta Offers Pilots 34% Pay Hike, Signaling Higher Airfares to Come in 2023 (December 5, 2022)
