Why co-pilots get paid a lot

The Houston Chronicle has an article by Shannon Buggs and Jennifer Latson about a problem on Continental:

The captain of a Continental Airlines trans-Atlantic flight died en route this morning. The Houston-based carrier said the captain of Flight 61 apparently died of natural causes. The crew included a relief pilot who joined the co-pilot at the controls of the flight from Brussels to Newark, New Jersey. The Federal Aviation Administration requires that flights longer than eight hours include a backup pilot in the crew, and that flights longer than twelve hours have two backups qualified to land the plane, said Roland Herwig, a spokesman for the agency's southwest region. Continental said the 60-year-old captain was based in Newark and had been with the company for 32 years. The Boeing 777, which was carrying 247 passengers, landed safely at 10:50 a.m. Houston time.
KHOU Channel 11 identified the pilot today as Craig Lenell, who has a home near Bush Intercontinental Airport. His wife, Lynda Lenell, told the television station that her husband had no known health problems and received regular checkups. She said the co-pilots thought her husband had fallen asleep during the flight, but they couldn’t wake him up.
Passenger Simon Schapira sat in one of the front rows, but never noticed anything amiss. Even the call for a doctor didn’t ruffle him; the frequent traveler has been on flights before where a doctor was paged, but usually just because someone wasn’t feeling well. The 54-year-old Brooklyn resident said he didn’t suspect anything until he deplaned to find a troop of policemen waiting on the walkway, then a bevy of reporters in the parking lot. “They said, ‘Did you hear about the pilot that died?’ ” he said. “I said ‘What? Never heard of it.’”
A Belgian cardiologist, Dr. Julien Struyven, 72, checked the pilot’s vital signs and declared him dead, The New York Times reported. Struyven told reporters that he tried to use a defibrillator on the plane, but was not able to revive the pilot. He said a heart attack was the likely cause of death.
Officials with the Centers for Disease Control boarded the plane after it landed, which is standard procedure in such cases, said Steve Coleman, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport. Passengers were allowed off the jet, then coroners came aboard and removed the pilot's body, Coleman said. Coleman said the airport was notified of the problem around 9 a.m. Houston time.
Schapira said he was happy an announcement wasn’t made during the flight. “The Bible tells you you’re not supposed to lie, but you don’t have to tell everything,” he said. “I still believe they made a very good choice not to tell the people. I feel there would have been such a commotion in that plane, it would have been unbearable.”
The National Transportation Safety Board has been notified, Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Roland Herwig said.
"It's up to them as to how they will be involved in this," he said. "I don't think this will be classified as an accident. It will likely be classified as an 'incident,' but that is preliminary."