Originally Posted by
SnarfSnarf
From now on, anyone that trys to tell me hiring is "normal", I'm going to show them this chart. At the going rate it seems like we just might bridge 4000 hires this year, which is the lowest number since 2016. The only reason there's even that many is because of the mind-boggling amount of hiring coming from 3 airlines. You have to go all the way back to 2013 to see the same amount of zeros on the chart.
And before some lost-decade'r comes at me with "look at what it was in '08"; yeah man, I know. It was terrible then. But it isn't like people are hyper fixating on 2023 and wondering why they haven't been hired at that pace. This year will likely be the worst year in 10 years.
Of course, all of that said leaves out 2020. Obviously hiring wasn't great then.
I think a lot of people have a distorted view of hiring history by being biased by the post pandemic period. In anticipation of years of reduced flying, many companies offered incentivized early retirements to pilots who promptly took it. Between that and the high number of age forced retirements the unexpected quick return of pax demand caused a hiring spree that was pretty much unprecedented. While you talk about the last ten years (and throw out 2020) looking at a longer period enables you to get a better look at the historical norm. Here’s the 15 years before your 10 year look back period:
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By that metric, hiring is actually pretty good right now. There was only one years in those 15 the entire hiring exceeded this year’s year to date, with three months hiring yet to be counted.
https://www.fapa.aero/pilot-hiring-history
Now having said that, anyone waiting for a flow of 60 pilots a year from a group of 1800 is still going to wait quite awhile.