Roaring success in one particular sector of commercial air transport has spotlighted a problem which has simmered for years - the industry-wide shortage of quality pilots.
The sector concerned is the European no-frills airlines, where the two most successful participants, Ireland's Ryanair and the UK's easyJet, have just launched the kind of pilot employment packages which those who joined them a few years ago would not have dreamt of. EasyJet's hub is London Luton, just a stone's throw from Ryanair's main hub at London Stansted. Ryanair shares Stansted with two other vigorous no-frills operators, KLM-owned Buzz and British Airways' Go, so it is not difficult to predict who gets hit first by the shockwave.
But this phenomenon affects all sectors of the market, in that the new offers could even attract pilots from the majors, particularly some flight crew tired of waiting on endless seniority lists for the chance of a command, and it would drive up pilot remuneration across the European Union.
The low-cost sector has not invented this state of affairs, but its success and consequent rapid expansion have accelerated the predictable arrival of a severe pilot shortage which most airlines appear to have been studiously ignoring. The only explanation for this head-in-the-sand attitude is that carriers thought that, as in the past, they might be saved by a recession. Economists, however, disagree over whether there will be a recession at all, and if there is the optimists think it would be a relatively mild one.
This goes further than Europe. At last April's Flight International Crew Management Conference in Barcelona, Spain, Boeing's forecasts of pilot shortages were examined against a background of evidence that fewer young people are attracted by the idea of working as an airline pilot. Boeing predicts that with the world commercial transport fleet of about 14,000 doubling to 28,000 by 2018, there will be a world shortage of pilots by 2005 and a severe shortfall in supply by 2008. Perhaps Boeing was being optimistic. Ryanair's and easyJet's recent offers will predictably create a buzz at this year's Crew Management Conference (London, 5-6 February), by which time the early effects will be visible.
One of the arguments for doing nothing about planning for flight crew supply has always been that there are more pilots with commercial licences than there are jobs. For jet and public transport turboprop operators, however, that argument does not wash.
As in every profession there are aircrew who have capacity in reserve for emergencies. Among the self-selected pilots, however, are some who scraped their qualifications by hard work.
However admirable the efforts and dedication of the latter group, they will cost the airlines more at all points in type and recurrent training, and may not perform well enough under pressure. Most owners of today's high performance transport aircraft operating in progressively more demanding air traffic control environments know that this is not an option.
Meanwhile, the supply of military trained pilots reduces in absolute terms and the air transport industry relentlessly expands. There is only a limited number of young people who can afford to sponsor their own quality pilot training, and research indicates that today's young are less inclined to mortgage their lives for a job which is not guaranteed. If an airline has not set up some form of pilot supply system either by itself or with other carriers, it may soon look up to find that it has missed the bus, and the penalty will be a halt to expansion or even a forced reduction in services.
And at the higher end of the market, where airlines need command experience to replace those who retire or those head-hunted by the operators right at the top of the supply chain, the poaching from smaller airlines gathers pace until it reaches the flying schools, whose instructors are sucked into the airlines, killing off the ultimate source.
Source: Flight International
