Why British Airways Pays a Pilot $100,000 a Year to Never Leave the Ground

The job ad

British Airways is hiring a Boeing 777 pilot in Chicago. The job pays around $100,000 a year. The pilot will never leave the ground.

The entire role is taxiing — moving the aircraft under its own engine power along the network of roads that connect runways, gates, and terminals. A few minutes of work per aircraft, a few aircraft per shift. No passengers on board. No takeoff. No landing.

It sounds absurd. But this job exists because it’s the cheapest solution to an expensive problem.

Why the plane has to move

Chicago O’Hare has four terminals. When a British Airways flight arrives from London, it pulls into Terminal 5 — the international terminal. That’s where US customs and immigration are. Passengers have to go through passport control and baggage claim before they can leave the airport, so the plane has to park where those facilities exist.

But British Airways doesn’t depart from Terminal 5. Its outbound flights leave from Terminal 3, where its partner American Airlines operates. That’s where the gate staff are, the ground equipment is, and the next load of passengers will board.

So between landing and the next departure, the plane has to physically relocate. It needs to travel from one terminal to another — sometimes over a mile across the airfield.

Why you can’t just tow it

Airports do tow planes. A tug — a squat, powerful vehicle — hooks onto the nose wheel and pulls. It works fine for short moves around a terminal.

But at a busy airport like O’Hare, the taxiways are active. Other planes are using them, moving at 20–30 miles per hour under their own power, following instructions from air traffic control on the radio. A towed widebody is slower, harder to manoeuvre, and can’t communicate with the control tower the way a pilot can. It blocks everything behind it.

Taxiing under engine power is faster, more responsive, and keeps the traffic flowing. But it requires a qualified pilot in the cockpit — someone type-rated on the Boeing 777 or 787, meaning they’ve been specifically trained and certified to operate that aircraft.

Why the flight crew can’t do it

The pilots who flew the plane from London have been on duty for ten or eleven hours. Aviation regulators set strict limits on how long a crew can work — these exist to prevent fatigue-related accidents. By the time the plane lands, those pilots are done. They’re heading to a hotel.

The crew who’ll fly the plane back to London hasn’t started their shift yet. They’ll arrive at the aircraft later, at the departure terminal, fresh and within their allowed hours.

That leaves a gap. The plane is at Terminal 5 and needs to be at Terminal 3. The arriving crew can’t do it. The departing crew isn’t there yet. Someone qualified has to sit in the seat during that gap.

Hence the job ad. A resident pilot, based in Chicago, whose entire purpose is to fill that gap — taxi the aircraft across the airport, then hand it over.

The bigger picture

Every minute a plane sits on the ground costs money. The aircraft isn’t earning revenue. The gate it’s parked at could be used by another flight. Ground staff are waiting. Fuel trucks are waiting. Catering is waiting.

Airlines obsess over turnaround time — the period between a plane landing and taking off again. They optimise gate allocation, crew scheduling, fuelling sequences, baggage handling, all to shave minutes. A long-haul aircraft like a 777 might cost $15,000–$20,000 per hour just in ownership and maintenance. Sitting idle is expensive.

So when British Airways runs the numbers, paying a resident pilot $100,000 a year is cheap. It’s cheaper than the delays a towed aircraft would cause. It’s cheaper than paying flight crews to extend their duty. It’s cheaper than repositioning departures to Terminal 5, where they’d lose access to American Airlines’ ground operation.

The job exists because it costs less than every alternative.

What this looks like when you fly

Next time you’re at a big airport and your connecting flight is in a different terminal — or your departure gate changes at the last minute, or your plane arrives 20 minutes late but still somehow departs on time — there’s a version of this puzzle being solved behind the scenes.

Airports look like buildings, but they operate like logistics networks. The layout, the rules, the regulations, and the economics interact in ways that produce solutions you’d never guess from the passenger side. A six-figure salary for a pilot who never flies is one of the more visible ones. Most of them, you’ll never see at all.