Originally Posted by
Pilatus801
I just went into the airline profiles on APC and grabbed the pilot numbers for all the US majors, Legacy, Regionals and the larger Cargo operators.
Total number of pilots just from those groups is 91,572. And, that is leaving out fractionals, charters and many other aviation providers. So the Boeing projections of 6,877 per year is likely an accurate forecast. I would tend to believe that Boeing put a lot of detailed research and computing to arrive at their numbers, rather than just shooting from the hip.
According to the age study put together by Delta a couple years back there were ~86,000 pilots between the Major/Cargo/Regional carriers in North America. of those 57,258 will reach mandatory retirement in the next 20 years. So outside of the retirements Boeing is predicting an expansion of 60,000 pilots. That's more than DL/UA/AA/WN employ today combined. Is it possible? Sure, certainly the industry has plans to grow. But that scale sounds more like what Boeing
wants to happen than a solid forecast of what
will happen.