Pilatus801

I've been hearing about this pilot shortage in magazine and news articles for almost 20 years. How many of you think it is real?
I'm more of the opinion that free market forces are at play. In other words as pay is going up, and likely needs to continue for new hires, then more and more pilots will come out of hiding. I believe there are thousands of pilots who walked away from aviation due to low pay, knowing they could find more lucrative careers elsewhere. It wasn't that long ago that starting FO pay was in the 20k per year.

So what do you think? Is the pilot shortage real, or will more and more pilots step forward as pay increases?

rickair7777

Right now it's real in one sense...

In the past reasonably qualified pilots were available to fill regional/commuter seats for peanuts. The regional industry as we know it today was actually built on this premise. The problem is that the only reason people were willing to work for peanuts was for a shot at the big leagues.

But after 15+ years of stagnation, bankruptcies, and outright catastrophe the word got out that the career was going nowhere fast. This, combined with millenials' tendency to stay home and interact with world through their iphones, has produced a shortage of pilots willing to work for cheap. Of course the industry looks pretty rosy at the moment, but it takes time for the word to get out. Many of those who should be major new-hires today went to dental school in 2007 instead.

This is actually a problem because the current regional infrastructure is based on those economics. Regionals can afford to raise new hire pay a bit, but they can't pay all FO's $100K and CA's $180K. The economics of the model would fail.

There is also a real shortage of applicants who would have been consider "qualified" 15 years ago. Standards are much lower, and while they can get away with it for a while eventually it will catch up with them. You can gloss over a weak pilot in the right seat, and the system is so inherently safe that you can coast for a while, but eventually all those people will upgrade. Unfortunately it is the nature of managers to take a short-term view... they have to cover scheduled flying this quarter, and not are really worried about five years from now (when they likely will have a different job anyway).

Longer term... there could in fact be a real shortage of qualified pilots at the majors in five years. A little bit of that is good for pilots because it drives up compensation, but if it gets to the point where it stiffles growth that's bad for everyone... pilots, managers, and pax.

2StgTurbine

I do think it is real, but I don't think it will bring air travel to a halt. Majors won't have an issue, but regionals, 135 carriers, and flight schools will. I have already seen the quality at my local flight school decline.

I have heard that there are plenty of pilots out there who left the industry and are waiting for the pay to increase. The people I have seen who fall into this category don't seem like they can fill the void. Lots have been out of the game so long that they require a lot of time to catch up to speed. I don't mean that they forgot how to fly, but the industry has changed a lot in the last 10 years and they need individualized training which regionals can't provide. The other group are highly experienced and have kept up with the changes in the industry but they don't think they need to waste time getting recent experience at a regional and are holding out for majors.

rickair7777

I don't see an actual shortage of FAA certificate-holding pilots willing to fly for majors airlines, but the quality of the available applicants may be far below what the industry is accustomed to... and that's a problem because training, SOP, company culture, and even the design of the aircraft themselves have all evolved around a relatively high common-denominator pilot. What worked for top-gun grads might not work for somebody who came up as a shift supervisor at Arby's.

Ab-initio might be needed, and since the airlines are footing the bill they would have *some* control over the quality of the applicant pool but even so someone who looks good on paper and takes tests well does not necessarily make a good PIC.

Yes, there's a pool of qualified (perhaps rusty) pilots waiting in the wings, but that pool only exists because things sucked for the last 15 years. Once all those folks return to 121, that pool is empty. Same for the pool of mil guys who would rather work for airlines but lingered on AD because of poor industry conditions... that pool is about exhausted even now, and the USAF wants them back already!.

Once those pools are empty, the future flow of new pilots is totally dependent on student starts at UPT, university, 141, and 91 flight training programs.

atpcliff

22,000 US pilots are retiring. All the regionals together have 18,000 pilots currently. Some of them are among the 22,000 retiring. A very large % of new US certificated pilots are foreigners with no green card and/or foreign cadets.

I'm glad I'm not in HR right now!!!

pilotdds

I see what you did there