I often joke that “I’ve been planning to retire since the day I was hired.” So from where will the next generation of pilots come ? When I was fresh out of the military, airline jobs were very competitive. When asked why I accepted a job with such and such airline, I respond “They were the first to offer me a job.” The future will be very different.
There is a pilot shortage. There’s also a growing shortage of aircraft mechanics and air traffic control specialists (maybe a future article). The various pilot groups have been telling airline management for 10 years that the shortage was coming. While management may have heard, they did not listen, and did nothing to strategically plan for the shortage.
The industry, since 9-11, has struggled with profits, to the point where there are now just 4 major airlines; Delta, United, American, and Southwest. The bankruptcies and mergers in the 2000’s stripped the work groups of pensions, medical benefits, work rules, and pay rates. It’s only in the last few years that the airlines have started to make a profit, the work groups struggling to crawl out of the crater of concessions. None of the airlines had been hiring from the late 90’s until about 2016, while the pilots just got older. In 2008, the mandatory retirement age changed form 60 to 65. This created another 5 years of stagnation, allowing airline management to further “kick the can down the street.” The outcome of the Colgan Air crash outside Buffalo in 2009, forced the FAA to raise flight time requirements for commuter airline jobs. All of this has coalesced into a perfect storm, if you will… the law of unintended consequences.
For the most part, there are two avenues to a job with a major airline, military and civilian. The civilian route involves spending lots of money to get your basic pilot ratings. After you get your Certified Flight Instructor (CFI) license, your can start charging people (not very much, though) to learn to fly. Once you’ve instructed for a couple of years, you had accumulated enough time to get hired by a regional carrier, and earn a bit more money. After many years at a regional airline, you might get hired by a major airline. Ahh, now you’ve made it to “the show.”
There have been very few retirements. Major airline pilots have been staying to age 65 (no longer any retirement medical benefits (thanks to bankruptcies)). Without seats at the majors, the regionals stopped hiring, they didn’t need any new pilots. Therefore, there was no place for CFI’s to go. Many pilots, seeing no commercial future, just stopped flying, finding more lucrative jobs elsewhere. Interest in a pilot career wained, so pilot starts hit new lows. Then the FAA raised the minimum flight time for a job at a airline operating under FAR part 121 (mainly all regional and major airlines) to 1500 hrs and had to have an Airline Transport Pilot certificate (ATP). This put further stress on a career path.
So, as profits are increasing and all the pilots hired in the mid 80’s to mid 90’s are starting to retire. The airlines are hurting to hire, as the qualified pool is being depleted. The regional airlines are having trouble finding pilots and the flight schools have lost all their CFIs to the airlines. There’s nobody to teach new pilots. It’s only going to get worse.
A few years ago, seeing a shortage looming, the FAA granted some university flight programs an exemption to allow it’s graduates to qualify for a regional job in 1000 hrs. Many graduates of these programs stay to teach. Just about all are being approached by non-airline flight operators right out of school. The universities are struggling to keep CFIs. In order to train for your CFI, you have to be taught by a CFI that has a minimum level of experience. The problem is that by the time a CFI has the requisite experience, they leave for a higher paying job. There aren’t any CFIs to teach new CFIs.
At one northern university (UND), where my oldest son goes to school, they have had to limit the number of enrollments in the aviation program because a lack of CFIs. All the other universities are having similar problems.
Between United and American, I’m not sure who has the oldest pilot list. But American has about 15,000 pilots. In the next 12 years, one-half of that list will have to retire at age 65. That’s 7500 pilots at just one airline!
A Google search will list a number of different predictions for job shortages over the next 15 to 20 years. Boeing, the FAA, the DoL, AOPA, FAPA, are just a few to predict massive shortages, and have been doing so for years.
Here’s a link to an article from Boeing
So, for you young people, the future is extremely bright in the aviation business. It’s not if you will have a lucrative airline career, it’s just a matter of which one.
But what does this mean for the traveling public in the next few years? As one of my college professors use to always say, “I will leave the derivation of the equation as an exercise to the student.”