Originally Posted by
SebastianDesoto
Skybolt, your post is spot on and I don't think anyone disagrees with the sentiment. ATP as a minimum standard is great. But after looking into my crystal ball, I predict a serious problem.
Originally Posted by
SebastianDesoto
It has been remarked and become generally accepted that regional level flying has become a career peak for many pilots. At the company I work for, it is especially true. You can point to a variety of reasons for this, but I will not spend too much time in this post on that issue.
My guess is that flight training cost will become prohibitive to entering the career. A cash strapped, but talented person will more likely take the medicine, engineering, military, law, etc…route. Even though medicine and law are expensive educations and give no guarantees, hard work will still pay off.
The airlines will still have to staff their airlines. How will they do this if the supply is going down but demand is staying the same or rising?
The only thing I can see happening is that the current method of flight training has to change simply because of cost. You already see some morphing in training syllabus at places (like ERAU) by becoming more simulator heavy.
Beyond the initial training, there is now the issue of attaining ATP minimums. How are these students going to attain ATP minimums cost effectively? I mean cost that are justified by reasonably expected returns.
CFI jobs? That’s traditional. I still have a problem with the idea of instructors and mentors being only a couple hundred hours and maybe a couple years older than their students.
The military will NOT supply enough pilots in the future to staff the airlines needs, not even at the mainline level.
Multi Pilot License? That is certainly NOT in keeping with your “ATP minimums” sentiment. I personally think the idea of MPL is ****. However, I am not very confident that flight training cost can be cut to a level that justifies the current system/method of becoming a professional pilot. MPL seems like a natural progression. Chances are, pilots with less real air time will still fill our flight decks.
We are still a few good years from seeing any huge morphing, but these things don’t change overnight. They are gradual. My prediction is less and less FBO style flight schools and larger flight training centers that are heavily simulator based. The cost of fuel alone almost dictates this (Yes, it will go way up again). An airline could own and operate a program like this. It would reduce flight training cost, allow them to screen their candidates and allow them to pay their pilots low wages. If someone doesn’t have to spend a small fortune to get the job they are more likely to have an opportunity to do it and accept lower pay.
We know this because the industry has been in a constant state of change over its entire history. It will be different than what we are used to.
Mr. Sebastian, your exactly right. Barriers to entry into this profession are going to be such that it turns good people away or good people won’t even be able to enter in as getting a $70,000 loan to a job that pays $17,000 won’t probably cut it in this day and age.
I was talking with my university looking at ways to make training more affordable after the oil spike sent a dual C172 to nearly $200/hr. By the way, I was never older than any of my students until I got to my last year of four instructing. My favorite idea was the simulator, although not cheap per hour, it’d save a lot of money and significantly increases the quality of training in my opinion. I’d loved to have had one of those Frasca full visual sims when I was teaching, holy cow that’d been nice. But while simulators are great for teaching they’ll be horrible for CFIs to build time. So if 1500 TT (i.e. ATP) becomes a minimum to get hired to fly a B1900D or a E170 and PIC Part 135 minimums stay at 1200 TT its going to suck for the CFIs out there to build time and start paying their aviation debt off. And you’ll probably start to see the rich kid that bought a VFR only Apache get hired long before the more qualified instructor. That’s my beef with hiring mins to become a Part 121, just seems odd that a 2-day crash course at ALL ATP puts a check in a box and somehow shows a higher level of quality than the 1000 hour instructor who did your training. Its probably why ATP instructors call the ATP ride a joke. You go to them, they go to the "right" DE, and there's your ATP. Your so much more qualified then you were 3 days ago.
If ever the ATP became the minimum to become an airline pilot I think small piston single-engine and twin-engine aircraft, such as a B58 or C310, flying freight only should have an exemption to allow PIC’s to have less than 1200 TT. Say 600 TT with an SIC and 800 TT without.
I’m going to stick to my opinion, the problem is not a plethora of pilots, the problem is a plethora of jobs thanks to scope relaxation at the expense of both mainline and regional pilots. So now that major airlines aren’t hiring because their replacing their flying with CRJ900s and E-Jets the “pay your dues” wages of the regional industry have gone from temporary to long term. That sucks.