My dentist’s son is in middle school and has a passion and aptitude for being a pilot. She says he is discouraged and many consider something else.

The reality is 2029 is his college graduation year. Add some time to get 1500 hours, the Covid-19 recovery will be behind us. Furloughs all will have been called back. Massive pilot retirements will be making being a pilot a high demand career, once again.

Always have a good four year college degree in something he can fall back on, I say. Too many things can happen. Being a pilot is a great career, but always have a contingency. Fecess Happens.

He’ll miss the window.

The next hiring spree is 2024-2029 historically speaking. 2030-2033 will be another “black swan event” that brings about furloughs. These things are starting to get predictable

I’m glad you can backdate predict forward looking black swan events. This is one of the most hazardous things to do. I do not want you to manage my investments.

What does a passion and aptitude to become a pilot look like in a 12 year old?

basically everyone on this board seems to agree there is a pattern of industry resets that occur approximately every 10 years.

The peaks and valleys of this industry have almost found a rhythm

The causes are not from the same source. Statistically you have described a coincidence, not a causality.

If fair dice are thrown 5 times in a row, and each time they come up snake eyes, what are the odds they are going to come up snake eyes the next time:

A. Greater than 1 in 36 chance
B. Exactly 1 in 36 chance
C. Less than 1 in 36 chance

(Each die has 6 sides, so the odds of it coming up 1 is 1 in 6. The second die is the same. So 1/6 x 1/6 = 1/36)

The answer is B. Exactly 1 in 36 chance. The dice has no memory.

You get suckered in to the other options because your emotions say it must be. Since it happened 5 times in a row, it is certain it will happen again, next time. Since it happened 5 times in a row, there is no way it will happen again, next time. Your emotions are wrong.

Will there be a black swan event in the future? Yes, of course. But it could be a year from now, or 20 years from now. Each year has an equally likelihood.

Absolutely. Three regionals have already gone under as have a couple 135 operations. And that’s before 1 October. And people forget that the military cranks out about 1000 potential airline pilots a year, guys who have either gotten to retirement eligibility or have at least served their ADSC. And For the last 6 months most of those guys have pulled their paperwork, stayed in, and are waiting anxiously for a better hiring environment. All those guys are going to get picked up before Joe CFI with bare ATP minimums is going to get a shot.

The days of any regional tossing out free ATP classes and bonuses to attract someone with 1500 hours are gone, and they won’t be back for a number of years.

Not to mention the downward pressure on wages for everyone in the industry. The complex interaction of contracts and bankruptcies not withstanding.

Is the military requiring longer commitments from the guys that all of a sudden want to stay? I know companies like ameriflight are requiring a training contract so guys can't leave. I would think the military is trying to keep as many of their pilots as long as possible.

No one knows what the recovery will look like. Hiring again at minimums based on pent up demand is a possibility. People will want liesure travel. It may not be as profitable as last minute business travel- but it will still fill seats. When people stop caring about the virus (I stopped caring 6 months ago) things are going to come back.

There are a couple of important dates coming up:

October 1
November 4

Hopefully the election(no matter who wins) will kill the politicization of this and we can move on.

Depends. Certain events, training or a PCS move, can trigger an additional ADSC, but it simply doesn’t matter. The pilots they train don’t just disappear. And of those they train, an average of about a thousand a year will eventually wind up Airline pilots. It may be less than that in any given year (When hiring is poor) and more than that (When hiring is good), but ~1000 a year is the average. Maybe more now that the rotary guys are getting into the act.

It’s complicated. They also have limitations on rank too, and some things - like flying fighters - is largely a young person’s game.

Eventually, yeah. But right now there are fewer jobs, many of the people that would have retired over the next three years have already been retired, as have a lot of aircraft. And a huge surplus of people already with 121 experience are standing between those people who do not yet have 121 experience and those regional jobs.

It will still fill seats for those majors that can make money flying those pax. But they can’t fly these people at a loss. Different airlines have different business models. Some are highly dependent on business and international flying. Some are not. Furloughs routinely drive up average cost per seat mile because you are furloughing the lowest paid pilots and retaining the highest paid pilots. For multi type rating fleets, the training churn can become very significant.


perhaps. But for the last 20 years we have sort of created a culture of snowflakes. That’s why we got the ‘mission creep’ from ‘flatten the curve to keep ICUs from getting overloaded’ to ‘keep it locked down until a vaccine fixes things.’

Right or wrong, an expectation has been created. That it is an UNREALISTIC expectation hardly matters. The quickest vaccine
ever produced was the one for Ebola, and that took 4 years. And that is to produce a vaccine. Actually getting enough people immunized that it will make a difference will take longer. But that doesn’t matter, because about two-thirds of the population won’t want to open up the economy until everybody has the vaccine and the other third will be refusing to take the vaccine at all.