Pilot Shortage: How can it get fixed?
Yesterday, I discussed how the pilot shortage is unfolding domestically for airlines and the growing problem it will become in the very near future.
If the problem shows up in 5 years, we are already late in addressing the problem. It takes time for people to move through the various levels of experience needed to become an airline pilot. You cannot make an airline pilot in a few weeks or months.
In my view, there are a few things that could be done to start mitigating the problem.
1) Find a way to apprentice pilots into the airlines. Pay for the training and education in return for a commitment and a living wage that sees salary growth on a slower curve.
2) Revisit this 250 hours vs 1500 hours required rule. Raising it to 1500 hours was in response to the Colgan Buffalo accident and, in my view, an inappropriate reaction to a single event. Lower the hours to 500 or 750.
3) Turn regional airlines into these apprentice shops and tie upgrades between the regionals and national airlines.
4) Attract new entrants with bidding and seniority systems that reward productivity. Currently, there is no incentive to become a pilot for a legacy or SuperLegacy airline as you’re likely to sit in the same seat for 10 to 15 years in many instances. Find ways to reward productivity because it is a win for the airline and a win for the pilot willing to work hard for his / her upgrades.
5) Find ways for pilots to make their skills and their seniority more portable to other airlines. If airline A needs to furlough 300 737 pilots and airline B needs 100 more 737 pilots, there has to be a way to allow those needs to get met without punishing the pilots with entry level salaries again. ALPA, you could work this out if you wanted to. The point is to facilitate supply transferring to where there is demand. Otherwise, pilots tend to “hang on” at existing airlines in the hopes of keeping their seniority while seeing their skills wane from lack of use.
6) Find ways to sponsor flying clubs at the high school level. That’s where the bug for flying is best started. The teens who learn to fly at 15 and 16 are teens you can recruit out of college when you need them. The industry should be doing this already but doesn’t. Flying is expensive and horribly so compared to 20 or 30 years ago. Many who would willingly be attracted to the profession get diverted from it due to the entry costs.
Nothing here is revolutionary. Most of it embodies steps that could be implemented in one year or less. All of it requires the industry to acknowledge the looming problem and to be allowed to cooperate with each other to foster a better supply of new entrants when they’re needed.
Your entire premise is flawed and based on supposition.
This article is based on the false assertion that there is a pilot shortage. THERE IS NO PILOT SHORTAGE!!!! Why would the airlines fix something that DOESN’T EXIST????
For the past 40+ years, despite the constant threat of a “looming pilot shortage”, no airline has been unable to find naïve young men and women willing to jump at the chance to climb into the cockpit of an RJ, a Saab, a Dash 8, a Brasilia, a Shorts, a Beech 99, an ATR, or a 1900D and call themselves a “real airline pilot” in exchange for poverty-level wages.
No airline in the United States has had to cancel flights or curtail flight schedules because they are unable to hire pilots. That’s not supposition. That’s not hyperbole. That’s not a false assertion. It’s a fact. In other words,……THERE’S NO PILOT SHORTAGE!
The commenter is, curiously enough, responding to a post from a year ago. I say curiously enough because the pilot contacts I have an American Eagle are now telling me about numerous flights being cancelled this summer do to a pilot shortage. They are losing 20 pilots per month and lately have been only able to hire at about a 10 pilot per month rate. The shortage is getting critical and the prediction is that this will be solved with larger aircraft.
“Hey my gas low light is on and the gauge is at zero, but the engine is still running, so technically I’m not out of gas. So lets just keep driving like nothing is wrong.”
Remember what it was like when the major, legacy airlines didn’t have competition from low-cost carriers? The majors set ticket prices and made more money. Imagine there was a crisis coming that would only affect the low-cost carriers, how do you think the major airlines would respond? Would they downplay it and resist any efforts to prevent such a crisis, perhaps exacerbate it? Of course not, our modern airline executives are beacons of morality, ethical saints concerned only with the interests of their customers and employees.
The shortage is here, and it will be huge, resulting in absurdly low standards for new pilots, obscene profits for airline executives, and more than a few plane loads of passengers killed. The major airlines have allowed the US pilot training pipeline to wither by keeping silent. I believe they have far underestimated the coming US and worldwide demand for pilots, and even the majors will be effected. Or maybe the major execs figure they’ll get more obscenely rich if the majors have to cut capacity and the economy is in a crisis from it. Good luck to us all.