A pilot shortage that had gripped US regional airlines is finally easing, at least temporarily, due to aircraft production and maintenance issues that have left major US airlines with fewer-than-anticipated jets.
Now, the narrative has shifted from deficit to over-supply. The change is reverberating among regional airlines, flight schools and recruitment organisations, with some regional carriers freezing new hiring or furloughing existing pilots.
“We still have a dramatic pilot shortage, but it is being temporarily paused and somewhat concealed by an even-more-temporary large-aircraft shortage,” says Faye Malarkey-Black, chief executive of the Regional Airline Association (RAA). “We still don’t have all the pilots we need to fly all the routes and connect all the communities we want to.”
Those sentiments are echoed by executives at regional airlines and by other industry insiders.
They say the repreive, felt by smaller carriers prone to losing pilots to major airlines, results largely from delivery delays from Airbus and, to a greater extent, Boeing. As Airbus struggles with broad supply chain issues, Boeing has drastically reduced the number of new jets coming off its production lines since the 5 January mid-flight blow-out of a door-plug on a 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines. The US company has said it aims to return to a 38-monthly 737 production rate this year.
Airlines’ fleet-growth plans are further constrained by Pratt & Whitney’s recall of geared turbofan engines, forcing airlines globally to ground hundreds of Airbus A320neo-family aircraft.
Southwest Airlines, which operates an all-737 fleet, has been hit particularly hard by Boeing’s delays, as it has been counting on receiving the yet-to-be-certificated Max 7. In April, the carrier disclosed it was limiting pilot hiring amid surging costs and 737 Max delays. Chief executive Bob Jordan said Southwest was “implementing cost-control initiatives, including limiting hiring and offering voluntary time-off programmes”.
Then in June, American Airlines said it was applying the brakes on hiring new pilots in the year’s second half.
“As part of our previously announced capacity adjustments, we are temporarily pausing new pilot class start dates for September, October and November,” the carrier said. “This decision allows us to optimise our capacity and tailor our talent growth plans to best serve the current needs of our airline.”
United Airlines also dangled unpaid time off to pilots due to Boeing delays but said the programme, which has since been lifted, applied to only a small percentage of its pilot workforce.
At the beginning of August, Spirit Airlines disclosed plans to furlough about 240 pilots in response to what chief commercial officer Matt Klein calls “over-supply of industry capacity for the existing level of leisure demand”.
Signals of a pilot-hiring slowdown appear in sharp contrast to years of recovery following the Covid-19 pandemic, during which airlines agreed to major pilot pay increases to boost hiring and meet surging air travel demand. Airlines trying to re-establish and grow their networks simply did not have enough pilots to fly their aircraft.
Major airlines set the pace of pilot hiring in the USA, says Tim Genc, chief advisor and executive editor of Future and Active Pilot Advisors (FAPA), a pilot-consultancy group.
“When they’re hiring, they’re creating vacancies where they’re hiring from,” Genc says. “And that’s what influences more people to get into regional airlines or private business aviation. As long as majors are hiring, everyone is hiring; when the majors stop hiring, everyone stops hiring.”
The problem, Genc emphasises, is the metal – not the pilots.
“Without 100% blaming it on equipment issues, we can say it’s equipment issues,” Genc says. “There was a little bit of over-hiring. The airlines got a little too aggressive and brought more people in… and you mix that with grounding large percentages of fleets. We still need more pilots, but we’re losing aircraft.”
“While we’re waiting for Pratt & Whitney to figure things out, while we’re waiting for doors to stay attached to aircraft, while we’re waiting on delivery schedules that are way behind, we don’t have anything to fly,” he adds.
“At the majors, at least, we do temporarily have more pilots at the moment than they have aircraft to fly,” adds the RAA’s Malarkey-Black. “They had all gone on a hiring spree and had hired pilots precisely to fly the aircraft they expected to come on board. When they no longer needed to crew those aircraft – not because they don’t have the routes or demand but because they don’t have the aircraft – that changed their hiring dynamic.”
EASING PILOT ATTRITION
Broad generalisations cannot be made across the entire sector, but some US regional carriers have observed fewer pilots leaving to fly for major airlines.
For example, Phoenix-based Mesa Airlines has furloughed 12 pilots and is deferring training a further 41 new pilots – a response to “significantly reduced attrition among Mesa’s active pilot workforce”, the carrier said in early July.
The moves are expected to save Mesa – which has struggled to fly enough block hours to cover expenses in recent quarters – about $750,000 monthly.
It marks a major turnaround for Mesa, which had suffered an acute pilot shortage during its recent transition from flying regional routes on behalf of both American and United to flying exclusively for United.
Chief executive Jonathan Ornstein says that over the past two years Mesa’s monthly attrition rate often exceeded 25 pilots.
“As a result, we undertook significant efforts to increase our pilot hiring, including [through] our Mesa pilot development programme,” he says. “However, attrition has fallen more precipitously than expected at Mesa in the past few months, in part due to the slowdown or cessation of hiring across most airlines.”
“While we deeply regret these actions,” Ornstein continues, “we expect reduced attrition and a more stable pilot force will enable us to increase our Embraer 175 block hours with United. Based on our current outlook, we anticipate starting to recall pilots by the end of the year.”
Some carriers are taking advantage of the pause in pilot hiring to bolster other aspects of their operations.
American’s regional subsidiary PSA Airlines has been experiencing strong demand, with summer flying up roughly 15% compared with last year, the carrier tells FlightGlobal. The Ohio-headquartered operator will average more than 700 daily departures in August.
“That said, certain external factors – including Boeing aircraft delivery delays – have reduced our current need for new captains,” PSA says. “With that in mind, we have removed sign-on bonuses and instead are focused on optimizing utilisation of our existing team.”
PSA is taking advantage of the pilot-hiring slowdown to “focus on another strategic aspect of our business – maintenance technical services”, it says. Late last year, PSA “made the strategic decision to carve out technical services within our maintenance organisation and elevate it as its own function”.
In March, the carrier hired Mike Irmen, formerly of United, as vice-president of technical services. It aims to become the “first in the regional industry to have a dedicated tech services engineering and analyst team”.
There is no one-size-fits-all narrative for pilot supply at US regional carriers.
St Louis-based GoJet, for example, has been capitalising on the “hesitation in the market” – meaning the hiring lull – to add more pilots and drastically expand its fleet, chief executive Rick Leach said earlier this year.
GoJet – which operates exclusively under the United Express brand – is offering a “direct entry” bonus of $175,000 for captains, and an additional $25,000 bonus for pilots with Part 121 type ratings.
The package is “paid out within the first 12 months without any contractual obligations or strings attached”, GoJet says.
The programme is aimed at supporting GoJet’s medium-term plan to modify about 40 MHIRJ CRJ700 fuselages it has in storage, converting them to the more-spacious CRJ550 configuration. GoJet says it will add up to 10 CRJ550s before year-end, with the first of the type entering service in late July.
GoJet saw its block-hour flying in July increase 25% year on year, allowing for “an additional five lines of flights” in August.
Pilot hiring and advancement is going strong, GoJet says. It is seeing “sizeable referrals” for its direct-entry captain programme and “close to 100% participation” from first officers in its captain upgrade programme.
Chief pilot Matt Pennell says GoJet’s training programme is “currently thriving”.
“We’ve welcomed many talented pilots with Part 135 experience, enhancing our team’s capabilities,” he says. “I am incredibly optimistic about our future and confident that these positive developments are just the beginning.”
STILL IN ‘CRISIS’
The RAA has long maintained that the pilot shortage has been devastating for smaller US communities, where secondary airports have gone dramatically underused since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Those airports had the “least amount of seats and the least amount of departures to begin with”, Malarkey-Black says. “Now, they’re getting more seats but fewer departures.”
“We are still very much in the middle of a crisis, and a temporary pause in attrition is just that – it’s temporary,” she says. “Everything that was true before these airframe disruptions will still be true as we come out of it.”
“Even with this low attrition, despite that lull, we’re still not bringing back all those aircraft on the regional side, and we’re still not utilising the aircraft that we have,” she says. ”Block hours are still down – it’s coming up, but productivity is still not where it needs to be – and communities are still experiencing wholesale air service losses.”
Some 500 regional jets had been grounded across the USA as of April 2023, as 11 regional carriers – Air Wisconsin, CommuteAir, Endeavor Air, Envoy Air, GoJet, Horizon Air, Mesa, Piedmont Airlines, PSA, Republic Airways and SkyWest Airlines – did not have enough pilots to fly them.
Now, about 340 regional jets are grounded, a 15 July analysis of Cirium fleets data shows – suggesting significant progress in boosting pilot hiring.
Other signals suggest recent efforts to broaden the pilot pipeline have been effective.
The Air Line Pilots Association, International (ALPA), the largest pilots’ union in the world, says pilot training programmes are humming and that 11,086 new airline transport pilots’ licences have been issued in the past 12 months. For comparison, 9,491 such licences were issued in 2022.
“While airline hiring ebbs and flows, America’s supply of highly trained pilots has remained robust,” ALPA says. “The system is working as intended; we’re producing record numbers of pilots.”
FAPA’s Genc says more people than ever are attending its pilot-hiring fairs, but the era in which “getting a pilot job was like shooting fish in a barrel” is over.
High training costs and low starting wages long discouraged people from pursuing a career as a pilot. That is, until the Covid-19 pandemic flipped the airline industry on its head. Genc calls the ensuing boom in 2022-2023 “the best year in pilot-hiring history”.
Now, a large group of aspiring pilots are vying for a limited number of jobs.
“Pilots seeking jobs have got to be a little more aggressive,” he says. “They’ve got to be on top of their game. They’ve got to present themselves as different, above and beyond other [applicants]. And all the carriers can be a little more selective. Airlines can stand at the door with their arms crossed, saying, ‘Here’s what you have to do if you want to fly here.’”
Genc views the pause in the pilot-hiring frenzy as temporary, likely lasting as long as supply chain and manufacturing issues persist.
“Once those manufacturing issues are quelled, I anticipate this going away,” he says. “The problem is, how long is it going to take for that to happen?”
Malarkey-Black says the industry has to keep its foot on the gas when it comes to recruiting and retaining more pilots. Despite the respite provided by grounded jets and backed-up order books, some analysts still project the shortage of regional airline pilots in the USA will last well into the 2030s.
“It would be a huge mistake to use this fully external, fully artificial lapse in aircraft deliveries as any kind of excuse to stop doing everything we can to create a strong and stable [pilot] supply moving forward,” she says.
