Aircraft order backlog figures show airlines are investing in unprecedented numbers of new aircraft, but not in the skilled trades that are still needed to maintain and fly them. As a result, the global ab-initio training industry may have insufficient capacity to cope with demand when the existing, rather shallow pool of skilled personnel starts to dry up.
ICAO is alive to this risk, as council president Dr Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu explains: “International civil aviation’s greatest priorities over the coming decades virtually all derive from the projected doubling of our network’s capacity. The shortage of pilots, air traffic controllers, engineers and mechanics we are facing around the world, as well as the need to accelerate training and certification for these aviation professionals, and the new managers who will need to lead them, are key areas where ICAO’s leadership and action will be instrumental to the future viability and sustainability of our global network.” In early December 2014, the organisation held its second Next Generation of Aviation Professionals (NGAP) conference at its Montreal headquarters.
Several times in the last 20 years, pilot shortages have been forecast but did not materialise. Airlines expecting to be short of pilots and engineers have, several times, been reprieved: by economic recessions, by an air travel depression following the 11 September 2001 terrorist action, by the extension of the pilot working age from 60 to 65 in 2006, and finally by the global banking crash of 2008. So is the latest forecast of a skills shortage simply a mirage, like the other predictions were?
Peter Moxham, European training industry veteran and chairman of the International Professional Pilot Training Group (IPPTG), comments: “I do not think it is a mirage. In about four to five years we will see airlines unable to recruit air crew trained suitably for today's technology.” The result of that, he predicts, will be yet more airline disasters caused by crew failures to manage their aircraft when confronted with relatively minor technical malfunctions or routine meteorological challenges.
The evidence for a sustained skills shortfall is gathering. The consensus on air transport growth today is that the world is recovering steadily – if with regional differences – from the financial crash, increasing numbers of world citizens are acquiring a disposable income, and air travel is forecast to maintain a healthy growth rate for the foreseeable future. In fact industry experts say that early signs of airline awareness are already there to see, but this could be ephemeral.
In the years from the 9/11 attacks until very recently, the legacy airlines saw their short-haul business struggling not only with the vagaries of macro-economics, but also the inexorable rise of the low-cost scheduled carriers, so they were reluctant to risk investment in training crews they might not need if their market suddenly dipped again. On long-haul, the rise of the Gulf carriers has been a major influence on the way business is conducted, and they are attracting a lot of skilled personnel to their hubs, while more recently, Norwegian has brought a low-cost model to the medium/long-haul marketplace. All these new forces are proving powerful stimulants to travel demand as well as increasing the demand for existing skilled people.
CTC Aviation’s chief commercial officer Anthony Petteford sees 9/11 as a watershed moment in airline attitudes towards recruitment and training. Before that event, he says, the legacy airlines were involved in the process of recruiting pilots, but in the slump that followed 9/11 they opted right out, and just went to the retail market when they needed new aircrew. They were content to let the flight training organisations (FTO) do the recruiting, the student pilots to do the paying, and to let the FTOs share the risks of possible graduate unemployment with the trainees. Then if the airlines suddenly needed pilots, the graduates were there – not bespoke recruits, but at least licenced.
The situation of the low-cost carriers was different: they were expanding fast, so they needed a pilot recruitment and training programme. They met their ab-initio needs with a combination of cadetships and taking up some of the FTOs’ “retail” output. Moxham explains: “It is very noticeable that the low-cost operators are changing at a massive rate – they are now putting money into training for MPL [multi-crew pilot licence] and offering career structures that the legacy carriers simply do not wish to do.” He adds: “ Why go to British Airways and take 10-15 years to get a command when you can achieve this in five years at EasyJet or Ryanair where commanders are very well paid and get good continuation training throughout their career?”
But looking at the industry as a whole, Moxham explains the airline accountants’ perspective on investment in skilled people for the future: “It is easy to justify an aircraft order: airframes are an asset. Pilots are seen as a liability. Yet you need both.” Accountants who genuinely think like this are being short-sighted, he suggests: “Failure to invest in the skills supply will mean increasing costs for them. Good crew will become scarce and able to demand high salaries again, and finances will go into a spiral.”
Petteford reckons that, in the UK and European market, the pool of unemployed but employable pilot graduates only gives the airlines a buffer of about three to six months if demand were suddenly to rise. This fact, he believes, is starting to impinge on the legacy airlines’ consciousness. The evidence is, he says, that they are beginning to use their brand names to promote piloting as a career in a way they have not done for years. The carriers are no longer leaving it entirely to the FTOs to do the marketing for them, according to Petteford.
Just as a local example of this change, Moxham points out that the UK-based FTOs, which not long ago used to get their students from airlines all over the world, are now almost fully occupied just servicing the domestic market. But, he observes, this apparently buoyant demand does not seem to be engendering much confidence in the FTOs, because among the main UK FTOs, only CTC is expanding capacity while the others – through long experience of airline fickleness – are still being cautious. Money for expansion, says Moxham, “is still tight”.
European air travel is expanding, if slowly. Meanwhile, Lufthansa Flight Training, synonymous in many people’s minds with the airline but actually an autonomous FTO for many years now, at present has a significantly lower cadet intake than it normally does, according to Moxham. There is a large pool of Lufthansa-trained graduate pilots awaiting full employment, so the local pilot supply picture across Europe is not evenly spread.
Former Lufthansa captain Dieter Harms – also dubbed “father of the MPL” for his work with ICAO defining the multi-crew pilot licence system – has this to say: “A substantial demand for qualified pilots in the coming years is fact, even if the predicted global fleet growth is only 50% of the numbers which are presently anticipated; so it definitely is not a mirage. But as we all know, the growth rates vary substantially between the different parts of the world. Europe has the flattest growth and has enough training capacity to meet its demand.” Since leaving Lufthansa, he has still been deeply involved in pilot supply through his company Harms Aviation Training Consultancy.
The exceptions in Europe are some of the low-cost carriers. The chief pilot at Ryanair, Ray Conway, explains: “There is no doubt that committing to an aircraft purchase programme without giving consideration to crew training requirements is short-sighted in this day and age. We will train in the order of 600 new first officers and plan to promote in excess of 150 new captains this year. All of our courses are well subscribed. So far Ryanair has not experienced any issues with attracting capable, competent and confident pilots to fill the training plan. Fixed rosters, home bases, new aircraft and the possibility of a Boeing 737 Max command in 2019 is a very attractive proposition for most people setting out on a career in aviation.”
Harms looks across the Atlantic: “The US pilot shortage is home-made, as it is triggered by the unfortunate new requirement that Part 121 co-pilots need an Airline Transport Pilot certificate [not just a commercial pilot licence], a conclusion which is based on the fatal fallacy that the collection of flight hours implies the existence of the necessary competencies. The stakeholders in the USA are currently trying hard to correct this unpleasant situation and to find a solution using the principle of competency-based training.”
In the USA, highly favoured training organisations like the University of North Dakota and Embry Riddle Aeronautical University have been seeing their intakes for professional pilot degree courses slump. This is believed to be because of the extremely low entry pay pilots get with regional carriers, combined with the effect of the Congressional law passed following the Colgan Air accident at Buffalo – the law Harms referred to – making it a requirement for airlines only to employ pilots who have had 1,500 flying hours or more. The degree course gives them little more than 200h so they either have to instruct for a few years or even pay to fly in the general aviation sector.
The US Regional Airlines Association says it is now marketing piloting as a career at high schools and universities, and is looking for ways to enable member airlines to establish early connections with students at school and come up with career paths through training into the airlines. Some regionals in the USA have already had to close down routes for lack of pilots, and all the signs are that more of this will happen.
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Since the regionals are where the majors get most of their first officers, there is going to come a time when the feeders and the network carriers may have to come up with a joint solution to create a visible – and attractive – career path through the regionals into the majors just to ensure supply does not dry up. Harms observes that closing down routes will soon be one of the regularly-used ways of matching crew demand with supply.
He has some broad observations, not only on supply and demand, but also on whether – in the race to meet an increasing demand – quality can be maintained. Harms says: “The most critical pilot demand is the one in Asia and the Middle East, because Asia missed the opportunity to establish its own ab-initio training capacity and relies on ATOs [aviation training organisations] in the USA, Australia and for smaller numbers in Europe, at least for the time being. So when the USA starts using its internal pilot training capacity to satisfy its own needs, the fast growing Asian airlines will run into severe trouble.”
The Middle East, Harms says, has shown a little more foresight. “It looks like the big airlines in the Middle East have realised the threat. Etihad has acquired the Horizon Flight Academy in Al Ain and will start their own large-scale MPL programme soon. And Qatar Airways has engaged in long-term MPL programmes with FTOs in Singapore (STAA), the UK (CTC) and with the Qatar Aeronautical College.”
Harms is more optimistic than some experts, but he adds a critical proviso at the end of his assessment: “I am convinced that finally the aviation industry will find a way to meet the demand for pilots without reducing the quality requirements,but only if there are enough qualified instructors.” And those instructors must be qualified to train to competency-based standards, not the old pass/fail criteria.
All this is understood at the ICAO level, says Harms, but he warns that if the shortage of properly qualified instructors is not sorted out, and if instructors are not incentivised by offers of decent pay, the situation will go out of control. He explains: “This was recognised during the ICAO MPL Symposium in December 2013 in Montreal to be one of the most critical prerequisites to assure the availability of enough cockpit crews to allow for the predicted fleet growth. The civil aviation community has to understand and to accept that it is unavoidable to invest in the instructor workforce to assure the anticipated future growth.”
Harms adds a brief but final comment which suggests he assumes the industry recognises this as a given: “Reducing training quality is not an option.”
Moxham, on the other hand, is less optimistic: “The system cannot produce enough pilots on a global basis – fact – and the natural wish of fast-developing countries to ‘grow their own’ is leading to a lowering of standards. All recent accidents have been down to the crew not recognising the problem, or being unable to cope with events – all of which is down to poor quality training or skimping financially. More people being trained will not lead to better quality, and all training establishments are busy.” EASA says it hopes to counter the threat to quality by introducing competency-based training requirements at all training phases – ab-initio, type rating and recurrent training – and by driving the airlines to take up alternative training and qualification programmes for recurrent training. But driving these changes through the rulemaking process will take some years.
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In direct contrast to the gritty short-term thinking of those working in the airlines and training industry is ICAO’s idealistic drive to generate some momentum in the skills supply sector, especially in under-developed and fast-growing regions. Here is a recent announcement about its NGAP programme: “ICAO Council representative for the United Arab Emirates Capt Aysha Alhameli announced a new collaborative aviation discovery programme [ADP] at the event, coordinated between the FAA Academy, the Western Michigan University, the École nationale de l’aviation civile (ENAC), and the Association of African Aviation Training Organizations [AATO],” he explains, adding: “Beyond its initial information campaign, the ADP’s objective is to excite and motivate youth throughout African regions, facilitated by AATO. The ADP team has agreed on a roadmap and will submit a progress report to the NGAP taskforce in summer 2015.”
Despite this commendable work by ICAO, if most airlines continue to think of pilots and engineers as a retail commodity, its NGAP efforts risk being wasted.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
