Airlines which have stopped investing in the future just to survive the present are in for a shock. The future's going to see fleet growth in percentage terms at least as fast as it was before 2008, but the compound effect means that the increase in simple numbers will be mind-blowing.
That doesn't just mean hardware. The demand for highly skilled workers that cannot be trained overnight will also grow exponentially. Boeing Training and Flight Services has recently re-issued its forecast of the predicted demand for new pilots and maintenance engineers for the next twenty years. These are the numbers the industry needs to produce just to replace those who will retire, plus the additional numbers needed to fly and maintain the much larger world fleet.
Boeing forecasts a need for 448,000 new pilots to enter the industry over the next 20 years, and more than half a million new maintenance engineers.
When the upturn comes - and the industry is already reporting growth - the marketplace may contain about two years' supply of qualified pilots among those furloughed or trained but not yet hired, and rather less slack in the engineer market. Before that time arrives, however, the airlines are going to have to start working out where the new ones will come from, because the ab-initio training industry, under-invested for years, will also need to grow massively.
Source: Flight International
