Keeping pilots is getting harder for airlines and a growing shortage is making this worse
David Learmount/LONDON
Attracting and retaining pilots is tough work for today's flight crew recruiters. A pilot's job is becoming less attractive to today's youth, while the internet and a flight crew shortage are giving pilots greater freedom to move jobs.
Delegates from 44 companies and 20 countries analysed these challenges at last month's Flight International Crew Management Conference in London - just as the success of European no-frills carriers produced an unprecedented reaction to the shortage of captains. EasyJet is offering £30,000 ($43,000) "golden hellos" to Boeing 737-rated training captains, forcing its competitors to react to avoid losing their own (Flight International, 30 January - 5 February).
Controlling cockpit and cabin crews is a unique problem. Of all company employees, they are the most isolated from the corporate environment because of the nature of their work, and are therefore the least susceptible to company culture and indoctrination. Even their recurrent training is carried out by other specialists from their own ranks.
UK Civil Aviation Authority inspector Capt Giles Porter says: "The crew is a small organisation. It is created, does something, and then dissolves." As a small, autonomous unit, the crew's ability to function well affects the airline's basic mission, from meeting schedules and pleasing clients, to being safe or unsafe, he says.
Social factors
An extensive survey of crew safety experiences across the Lufthansa Group (including Lufthansa, Condor, Cityline, Lufthansa Passage and Lufthansa Cargo) has led to the conclusion that a combination of poor communication and an inimical "social climate" in the cockpit were by far the most frequent contributors to safety-threatening operational incidents.
In revealing the results, Lufthansa's head of aviation psychology, Reiner Kemmler, remarked that cockpit resource management training could only have a limited effect on improving "social climate", because that was a personality-based issue which "would not be changed in a two-day training session".
Over 4,000 pilots took part in the voluntary survey - 50% of the Lufthansa Group flight crew. The first question was: "What was your last safety-related event and when did it happen?" Most had happened in the past 12 months. Extensive questioning intended to isolate the causal components or combinations followed, broken down into four categories: technical; operational; human error; and social interaction factors. The operations/human/ social mixture was present in three times more incidents than any other.
Kemmler concluded: "Social relationship factors play a greater role than human error, operational or technical problems in the occurrence, risk, and mastery of safety-relevant incidents. Those factors stem from poor quality communications, inadequate information management, deficient relationship climate, and diminished capability." Lufthansa has initiated a programme in its selection procedure that will concentrate on communication skills and recognition of the kind of personality which is happy in a team situation, Kemmler said.
Porter says a multi-cultural mix in a crew has the potential to affect communication and "social harmony", but maintains that this can be managed positively. For work in multicultural crews, airlines should ideally select people who already accept cultural differences easily, but training can play a part. Porter recommends inter-cultural awareness courses in airlines where multi-national crews are common. Unsuitable personalities, apart from candidates with blatantly obvious characteristics like racism, include pilots with "unduly inflated egos, low personal tolerance for uncertainty, a history of emotional instability or extreme left or right wing views." A crucial component, says Porter, is "an organisational policy explicitly supporting cultural pluralism".
Crew and alliances
Multinational airline alliances imply the need for tolerance and flexibility within crews. CityJet chief operating officer Geoffrey White says the regional carrier has seen a crew turnover rate of 26.6% a year reduce to 3% - most of which, he admits, can be credited to the stabilising effect of a 100% take-over by Air France. But the airline remains Irish registered, with mostly Irish crews - so that the airline reaps the benefits of Ireland's lower personnel costs - but is now based in Paris rather than Dublin.
This requires, at the selection stage, assurance that the individuals are happy to have an operating base away from their home country, and that they appreciate the advantages of a greater variety of routes. Crews receive company information and rosters through extensive use of information technology, including intranet, company databases, and distance learning, White says.
A factor in the shortage of experienced pilots is the "huge gap" between commercial pilot licence requirements and what airlines need the training system to produce, says South African Airways' chief pilot for training, Capt Brett Gebers. He adds: "If we accept that experience was one of the predictors for the hiring of pilots and it is no longer available, then we need to ensure that the training is appropriate if the lack of flight time is to be mitigated."
Too much time and money are wasted on sending pilots solo when they want to be airline crew, Gebers maintains. Conversely, he argues, the newly licensed pilots have not been trained in crew skills, even though their licence permits them to operate as part of one. Gebers wants the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), and agencies like the European Joint Aviation Authorities and the US Federal Aviation Administration, to accept a licence course designed for pilots who are going to work in a multi-crew job. He argues that it is those who wish to fly single-pilot commercial operations who should be required to do the conversion course with the necessary extra hours.
Capt Wolfgang Henle, operations officer for Austria-based Tyrolean Airways, disagrees. He believes that solo skills are essential for pilots to develop their self-reliance and decision-making. If anything is to be cut out, he says, it should be the requirement for multi-engine experience, which he believes can be gained later. It is not an air transport pilot's licence (ATPL) prerequisite in its own right.
UK-based Oxford Air Training School's vice-president marketing Peter Moxham says that the new Joint Aviation Regulations for Flight Crew Licensing (JAR FCL) should include a requirement in the JAA ATPL course to include multi-crew training. He also warns non-US airlines that since Delta Air Lines has set up its own ab initio pilot cadetship scheme - the first serious acceptance by a US major of a real pilot shortage - the USA could relax the Green Card (foreign employment) rules for experienced first officers and captains. "There are an awful lot of people for whom the grass is greener on the other side of the Atlantic," he says.
Virtual crew bar
Airlines can can no longer control what their flight crews know about pay and conditions in the global industry. An internet forum like the Professional Pilots Rumour Network (PPRuNe) is described by founder Danny Fyne as a "virtual bar room". The internet breaks down barriers and enables endless information swapping - real and rumoured, accurate and anecdotal - about their work and employers.
Fyne says he started PPRuNe in 1995 "as a joke", but it has taken off internationally with 140,000 hits a month and rising.
Capt Robin Lloyd, one of Fyne's PPRuNe colleagues, advised airlines that setting up their own intranets for pilots may keep crews abreast of rostering and company information, and could even inspire exchanges of views within the company. He warned, however, that this will not keep them away from an open forum in which pseudonyms are allowed and absolute decorum is not a prerequisite.
Source: Flight International
