AIN: Is the Pilot Shortage Over?
 

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-n...ource=hs_email

The author thinks the shortage will be back with a vengeance once a vaccine is out and flying returns to more or less normal.

So do I, whether there is a vaccine or not. COVID has caused a number of Airline pilots to retire earlier than they would have and rather a lot of wOutdoor-be airline pilots who might have gone into training to put the brakes on. It has also caused and/or will soon cause disruption in the career progression at the regionals. A number of regionals have disappeared and more are likely to follow while many of the junior people at the regionals have either been furloughed or are simply not flying the hours they need for timely career progression. At the same time the most senior people at regionals - while they are continuing to fly - are getting older and many are reaching the point where being a career regional lifer will be a better QOL than going to a major and facing years of reserve fir a major right seat at not much more pay. Those senior regional guys just going career regional blocks career progression - at least to some degree - for everyone behind them.

of course, none of that matters until demand returns, but the pilot pipeline has lag time and it simply can’t be turned on immediately. So yeah, in the end COVID results in a worsening of the pilot shortage.

I predict the shortage will be back in a few years. My estimate by 2025. By then furloughs will have been recalled, demand will be back to normal, and the airlines will have worked through the early retirements.

Unless there is another black swan event

https://i.ibb.co/jGYgmbW/1670-DFBF-0...1-BF677-F5.jpg

Maybe one day. If it is going to take five years to go back to 2019 revenue, there will be a shortage of bankruptcy lawyers at the majors.

I think some pilots will find other careers (truck driver, cars salesman, manager, etc.) to meet family needs in the near term. After a few years of moving up the ladder, they will not want to leave the security to make 40K as a regional FO and have a repeat furlough event. I was planning to go to the airlines soon since about at ATP mins. Either by choice or reality, I’m planning on waiting until my daughter leaves the house before making the move now.

As they say.... the Devil is in the details.... however, I'd say the prediction of a V recovery will prove to be very accurate.

Glad you agree.

A "V" shaped recovery in 5 years does us no good when everyone is bankrupt.

Reality is that it's going to be a K recovery. Unless; there is going to be a stimulus to the economy aka giving people money such as stimulus checks or better yet bringing back the $600 to UI. Giving money to a regular joe will help keep the money flowing in the economy. Now that the money has dried up people are being more careful on what they spend their money on or they just save it which is smart for the person but not the economy. Basically the gov't has to spend money so that people (bottom 50%) are confident in the economy. If the people aren't confident then well, I'm going to be a CFI for a much longer time.

-Daddy

I think more like the Nike Swoosh.

Care to wager? What shall we play for.....?

Definitely a K recovery. Anything given to the top goes into financial products. Anything given to the bottom is spent on booze and rioting. Supporting otherwise insolvent companies can be a slippery slope politically with such a large wage disparity within them.

Although I did not hear it called as such, 2-3 years ago, many were claiming a K recovery. “The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.” Before COVID-19, the facts were those at the low end of the income were getting a higher percentage of income increases than those at the top end. Those typically chronically underemployed groups were seeing all time record low unemployment rate. Food for thought.

Good food is often wasted on the unappreciative.....

That is typical late in an economic cycle. Look at the situation right now, the rich have been made whole while the bottom third are experiencing unemloyment at historic levels. Trickle was the key word in "Trickle Down Economics"!

I’ll bite. Skip to 4:31 if you don’t have 10 minutes of your life to spend on understanding wealth inequality. I’ll phrase one ethical question to you regarding creation of wealth. If you create an idea are you entitled to the majority of wealth generated by that idea. Let’s says you have an idea that generates 10,000$ and you cannot do it alone. In fact you need 2,000 people for your idea to work. You decide to pay each of those people 2$ for their part while you keep 6,000$ for the idea that couldn’t function without a great many supports doing all the leg work. Is this ethical? Is this right? That’s late stage capitalism. Also consider how everything today is stock prices value of the company. You work to make the shareholders money. They do nothing but let money sit there in a hypothetical ownership. While you bust your but for a small paycheck. We need to reconsider who actually makes the world go around. It’s not ideas it’s people it has always been people. But today you can be a lazy rich person give money to people and keep majority of profit. That’s late stage capitalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caBD...&feature=share

... Except for all the wealth that gets ferried off-shore to avoid taxes or hoarded in safe-haven investments. Even the money that gets invested in the stock market only stands to really benefit the shareholders (55% of Americans), and that's only until a crash leaves your average investor holding the bag while the market movers with inside info get out at the top and buy back in at the bottom. Funding an IPO or SPAC generates tech and jobs, but that's a small part of the market.


If anything, giving money to poor people is a lot more likely to 'trickle up' because they're more likely to actually spend it on goods and services, driving the financial engine. I think people should be rewarded for their financial prowess and hard work, and people who want free rides should be punished, but the 'trickle down' theory is just a sales pitch that the rich use to convince suckers that they need lower taxes, which ironically go to pay for the services that those very poor people are most likely to need.


Trickle down might've been useful in 1980, when the top 1% were getting taxes at 70%, but nowadays their tax bracket isn't that much higher than the middle class. The way our financial institution works, it's a lot easier to go from $1M to $10M than from $10k to $100k. From the other side, trickle down makes it harder for new businesses to emerge because the bottom 90% of tax payers are shouldering more of the tax burden, which cuts directly into their necessities, preventing them from ever generating enough capital to get off the ground. Bezos can risk $1M and not care, I can't, and considering we're at record unemployment with a stock market at ATHs, the rich are being rewarded plenty, right now. They've beat the caricature of welfare mamas to death, but for some reason, it keeps working. There's a balance and it's very out-of-whack.

The,uh, guy making the $6k came up with the idea, hired the workers, assumed all the risk for production and reaped the benefits. The $2 earners made wages commiserate with the skill required to put lead in a pencil.

There’s a reason you, the pilot, are paid considerably more than the guy throwing bags in the belly.

That's a fabricated scenario with fabricated numbers that means absolutely nothing. Also, rampers vs pilots has nothing to do with the current tax structure and whereas it may relate distantly to the real wealth inequality issue, it's not a good analogy.

The gist of it is that America succeeds on innovation and being a land of opportunity, which has actually been severely eroded in the past decade or so.

It relates pretty specifically with those who acquire skills and assume risks being more highly compensated than those who don’t regardless of the fact that one requires and relies on a multitude of the other.

The little guy can’t get ahead mantra is beyond tired whether someone made a video about it on YouTube or not.

Relating the fabricated scenario to real world taxes:
"Let’s says you have an idea that generates 10,000$ and you cannot do it alone. In fact you need 2,000 people for your idea to work. You decide to pay each of those people 2$ for their part while you keep 6,000$"

The workers are getting taxed 50 cents (25%), and the guy who came up with the idea is getting taxed $2,100 (35%). The government gets $3,100.

If the government raised the tax on the guy who came up with the idea to 45%, then he'd pay $2,700 in taxes and his workers would only need to pay 20 cents. 30 cents for them is huge. That's a 15% increase in their take home money. The rich guy is still taking home $3,300 when it apparently only costs $1.80 to live comfortably, in this scenario, so I'd say he's been well compensated. The only difference is now 2,000 other people now have a little more breathing room.

Consider the average HOUSEHOLD income is around $50k. How are you going to pay for your student loans, a mortgage, car, groceries, and insurance for yourself, let alone a family? That's the average American household. Not even factoring in savings, retirement, and any misc expenses. "Average" in America can't afford the basics. Now tell me the top 1% need more tax breaks. At least know when you're getting ripped off.

It's pretty hard to be innovative or start a new business when you can't even afford the basics without going underwater.

I remember in Cuba, Fidel Castro set the wages of a doctor at 2/3 of a street sweeper. The doctor is inside in an air condrioned office. The street sweeper was doing a dirty, sweaty job. Therefore it is fair doctors get paid less. What happened? Cuban doctors fled to the US.

Not understanding Economic 101 leads to your thinking.

An abundance of workers (more people than jobs), low skill set, little financial risk leads to lower pay. A lack of workers, high skill set, big financial risk taking all leads to higher pay. It is as true for the small store owner as it is for Bill Gates. Bill Gates became a billionaire. His business allowed many of his employees to become millionaires. Many of them would not have become millionaires if the had not gone to work for him, someone like him, or took risks themselves in starting businesses.

Thats all fantastic until you realize there’s a point where the idea guys isn’t going to assume the risks because his ROI isn’t worth the hassle. You essentially halved his potential profit so that his unskilled workers could take more money home. Well, they get to take nothing home when he decides not to pursue his idea and doesn’t hire them. It’s not a magical zero sum game.

As for the little guy can’t get ahead on $50k if he has student loans, car and house payments and so on and so forth....you’re right. You don’t get to have it all at once on that kind of income. But plenty of Americans will try it anyway. Financial literacy is a real thing as is delaying wants over needs. Getting ahead doesn’t occur by happenstance.

Which is why taxes should be virtually non-existent.

And this money you want to give to "poor people" ... where does it come from?

Is not this cycle artificially high levels of unemployment due to Covid? Is not a trickle better than a drought?

It really boils down to workers share of capital. When workers get too much, it looks like western civilization in 1978. When workers get too little, it looks like 2020. I would much rather have been in my prime working years in 1978. Remember when it was normal to get into a major in your 20s? And a senior captain could go new car shopping on a bi-weekly basis?

I understand supply/demand just fine and I get you're towing the line from 1990 macroeconomics 101, but times have changed. Wages adjusted for inflation have become static while cost of living has increased and productivity has continued to soar:
https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap
The problem with a constant growth economy is that it's unsustainable. If we're giving out financial advice, then I recommend paying attention to the economist Peter Schiff (except he's aggressive about selling gold which is a meh investment).

If making 1600 times the average income isn't motivation, then I don't know what is.

The problem is you used to be able to distinguish yourself based on merit by completing a higher level of education. Now colleges are largely jokes (I used to take non-engineering classes just to boost my GPA because a few hours of effort a few days a semester yielded a 3-credit A) but it costs $50k in tuition alone to get a degree from a public university, most of which are funneling as many people as possible into easy, useless degrees. It's easy to laugh at them, especially when I'm sitting on a useful degree, but when THAT many people are in THAT much debt, then cue COVID... we're playing with fire, not to mention, for a big chunk of those people, the American dream is unachievable until their 40s. I just think we can do better.

I'm not on the Libertarian train. I see it more as workers working themselves to death, in a lifetime of debt for crappy furniture from the company store. The market doesn't always prevail. It'd be like removing all rules from the NFL, everyone starts using 'roids and bringing weapons to the line of scrimmage, but saying, "they'll eventually police themselves." They might, but not for a long time and not until a lot of damage has been done. In my ideal world we'd financially incentivize "made in America" and bring manufacturing back from China. I don't think it'd be as expensive as everyone thinks. The average Chinese factory worker makes about $6/hr whereas an American would cost $15-$20, plus all the environmental regulations, but at-scale, those costs are significant.

Also, every American man, woman, and child is in almost $10k of debt for the CARES Act for money that all trickled up. Like it or not, we're effectively doing MMT right now. I'm not a fan at all. Billionaires don't spend the money they make, effectively not closing the loop so our financial institution hasn't been a closed system for a looonnnggg time. We're really testing Bretton Woods right now, which relies on global buy-in for the USD at a time we're trying to become more isolationist.

A college degree should get you into a six figure job. Maybe not right out of the gate, but in less than a decade.
A person who pursues a worthless degree and a few hundred thousand in debt has no one to blame but himself.

There are some degrees that do not land you in a six figure job, teaching being a good example.

Med school, dentist, vet, lawyer, engineer, scientist, business administration, etc., yes.

Worthless degree = an degree that ends in the word “studies”.

What is Riddle and its students seeing that I'm not????

I am just not that optimistic.


https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/...lanned-for-21/

The investment in new aircraft follows increased enrollment. According to the school, its Fall 2020 incoming class, some 859 strong at Prescott alone, is the “largest incoming class in history.” The Daytona campus saw 1,731 new students, its second-highest enrollment spike ever. Between the two campuses, ERAU has more than 10,000 undergrad and graduate students, also a record.

Our current planning horizon is to grow to 1,200 flight students within five years,” said Parker Northrup, Flight Department chair on the Prescott Campus.

Freshman now, graduating Spring 2024, 2 years as CFI, ready for 121 regional mid 2026. I look at it as a long game for these new students, banking on regionals hiring at 1500 again in 6 years.

If I had to take that bet, over under on 1500 hour pilot hiring at regionals again in 6 years from now, I’d take the under. I wouldn’t take the under if you said 2-3 years but 6, sure.

Then 4 years at a regional, new hire at a major by 2030, just in time for the next downturn/black swan event/etc! jk but not jk

True. I guess I'm so used to the "immediate here and now" mentality, I figured folks looking at the bleak outlook now would be scared away.

Are the aviation programs pushing a really hard PR campaign now?

A much larger % of the student body in the flight program is foreign now. Not sure how that happened, but checking back every once and a while they seem to have boosted the foreign % over the years, vs. decades ago very little foreign.