Workers remove debris at the scene of a plane crash site of Continental Connection Flight 3407 in Clarence Center, N.Y., in this Feb. 16 file photo.

Clarence, N.Y. ? Long-suffering pilots for commuter airlines say it’s about time that Washington and passengers alike pay attention to the cockpit, after a federal hearing into the deadly crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 exposed pilots who may have been exhausted, under-trained — and paid less than the bus or cab drivers who’d ferried their passengers to the airport.

“We have been calling for years trying to get the public to understand what their lifestyle is really like,” said Capt. Paul Rice, first vice president of the Air Line Pilots Association, International, the nation’s largest pilot’s union, representing 54,000 flyers.

Like Flight 3407’s co-pilot, Rebecca Shaw, Capt. Dave Ryter earned around $17,000 in his first year with a regional carrier and flew coast-to-coast just to get to work because of his placement in Miami.

“My wife held down a job and we lived in an apartment about 45 minutes north of Los Angeles International (Airport) and scraped by,” said Ryter, who has 10 years with his regional airline and is a union officer with ALPA.

Regional carriers like Ryter’s, and Shaw’s employer, Colgan Air, handle about half of all domestic departures and about a quarter of the passengers, about 160 million yearly, often flying under the names of their larger partner airlines, like Continental or USAir.

But with smaller planes, shorter routes and less experienced pilots, they pay considerably less than their larger counterparts, despite pilot schedules that can include multiple daily flights for six days in a row.

Rice described draining 14- to 16-hour duty days, much of that time unpaid and spent waiting in crew lounges. With no food on planes, pilots grab meals on the run from airport fast-food stands. Perks like holiday and overtime pay don’t exist, he said.

To earn six to eight hours of pay, “you can come to work at seven in the morning for an eight o’clock departure and park your last flight at nine o’clock that night,” said Rice, whose union favors tougher FAA regulations on how many consecutive hours pilots can fly or be on duty. The issue has lingered on the agendas of the FAA and the NTSB since the mid-1990s.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s recent three-day hearing into the Feb. 12 crash near Buffalo that killed 50 people set off a cry in Congress for a review of safety at regional carriers, including training, scheduling and pay issues.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has scheduled hearings Wednesday and June 17 on pilot fatigue and safety. A House hearing is also planned for June, although no date has been set.

Pilots said fatigue and lower pay are eroding the quality of pilots entering the airline industry, both at regional and major carriers.

“It used to be that airline pilot jobs were a coveted position,” said veteran pilot Jeff Skiles, the first officer of US Flight 1549, which collided with Canada geese after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport in January and ditched into the Hudson River.

“But even at the major airline level, with the bankruptcies and how they’ve decimated our contracts, it’s just not an attractive job any more,” Skiles said. “People aren’t leaving the military to become pilots — there are plenty of other options. For instance, corporate flying has exploded quite a bit. What you’re finding is the qualifications of the entry level pilots in the traditional airline business have gone from adequate to very inadequate.”