US airlines have always survived without having to make any provision for ab initio pilot training. But things have changed radically and almost all the airlines seem to be oblivious to the signs. Or perhaps they have noticed, and their immobility is that of rabbits caught in the glare of headlamps.
The pilot shortage indicators are there. Regional airlines are cutting frequencies or expansion plans because they do not have enough pilots, complaining that the major carriers are poaching their flightcrew. So what is different? The majors have always poached the regionals' pilots. The difference is that two years ago a regional would not hire a pilot with less than about 2,000 flying hours in his/her logbook. Now they are hiring 800h pilots and soon, the USA's major pilot training schools predict, they will be happy with 600h or less.
All the traditional pilot supply sources from outside the industry are drying up, and the failure to acknowledge that there is a problem means that, when it arrives, the US pilot famine will last several years. The majors, at the top of the metaphorical food chain, will be the last to feel the famine. But it will hit them suddenly and hard, and then there will be the inevitable safety implications.
The only thing that can save the US airlines from a pilot shortage now is an economic downturn. This is the bell by which they have always been saved before, but the unusually long period of prosperity looks set to continue. In an industry used to boom and bust, this is something they have never had to face.
Neither are they used to the paucity of pilot supply from the military , something which is set to continue indefinitely. The US Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) puts it best, explaining that, viewed on a strategic timescale, economic (and therefore airline) expansion has followed major military conflicts - conflicts on the scale of the Second World War, Korean War and Vietnam. After each, the massive demobilisation of military pilots largely fuelled the airlines' needs for flightcrew. The first two of those conflicts are history in the military and economic sense, but Vietnam is not. Many airline pilot veterans of that prolonged conflict are about to retire, however, causing a retirement bulge. Meanwhile, the post-Glasnost demobilisation has already been absorbed by the industry, and conflicts like the Gulf were so brief that they did not boost military pilot training significantly.
Never mind. When Delta Air Lines advertised recently for a few hundred pilots it had 16,000 applications. This highly desirable employer thus wrote off allegations of an impending flightcrew shortage. But this is head-in-the-sand stuff. Almost all those applicants were from pilots already in the industry - working mostly for smaller airlines. A significant minority would have been unemployable. Finally, they are not merely Delta applicants; they are the same pilots who are applying to all the other majors.
The real problem is at the bottom of the pilot supply chain: the flying instructors. Most of these are young, just-qualified pilots building the hours that the industry used to insist on and no longer can. So the schools are losing their instructors sooner, which means two things: there are not enough instructors to meet the training demand, and the USA's future airline pilots are being trained by people who have hardly any more experience than their students. One major pilot training college at least is looking overseas for instructors, and all admit to being in desperate straits despite boosting instructor salaries considerably.
So if this is the USA's problem, why should the rest of the world care? For several reasons. If safety statistics in the USA ever come to reflect a desperate search for pilots which results in a lowering of selection standards, the worldwide reputation of airlines will suffer. This is not a matter of low flying hours. As the training tradition in Europe and other parts of the world shows, careful aptitude testing and selection by the airlines followed by a consolidated ab initio professional training course can put a first class pilot in the right hand seat of a jet with about 300h. But the US airlines will have to set up a system designed to do this, or end up praying for an economic downturn.
Source: Flight International
