If recurrent training is outsourced, airlines lose an opportunity for crew contact
Expanding commercial airlines face problems obtaining, training and retaining quality flightcrewDavid Learmount/frankfurt
US commuter airlines are losing aircrew at the rate of about 20% a year, being bled dry by airlines such as Delta Air Lines which is hiring 50 pilots a month. Recruitment is rife in most parts of the world, except for Asia-Pacific where, for the time being at least, airlines are suspending hiring along with aircraft orders.
Flightcrew and their training remain expensive at a time when airlines are faced with pressures to cut costs, and the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has warned that criteria for pilot licences are going to be more stringent. The carriers, as a result, are being forced to analyse critically both traditional and innovative ways to approach all the issues associated with hiring and employing pilots. That much was evident at Flight International's 26-27 March Crew Management Seminar in Frankfurt, Germany, where 86 people representing 54 organisations from 27 countries met to examine the changing ways in which aircrew of the future will be procured and managed.
TODAY'S MARKET
Crew recruitment consultant Geoffrey White of Ireland-based PARC Aviation described today's flightcrew market:
Increasing demand versus dwindling supply (with a drop in the numbers of the formally selected and trained ex-military pilots); a reducing airline commitment to training; increasing pilot career self-management.White set out some clear delineations between the pilot management approaches of what he, generically, called the "Modern Airline" and the "Traditional Airline". They are opposites in all respects where aircrew management is concerned.
The modern airline economises on flightcrew salaries and benefits, does not invest in a training infrastructure, accepts low crew experience, demands high productivity, and does not use a selection procedure beyond licence qualifications and an interview. White emphasised that, with a relative shortage of qualified airline pilots, there is "an increasing focus on the licence as the accepted standard in order to meet demand". As a result of its approach, the modern airline wins on productivity and direct costs, but loses on pilot attrition, which has its own costs.
The traditional airline, on the other hand, offers better salary and benefits and has its own training infrastructure. It also has a selection procedure which goes beyond checking paper qualifications, and tends to have more experienced crew. It, therefore, tends to lose out on productivity and direct costs, but has a low attrition rate and experienced crews.
White examined the aircrew marketplace from the pilots' point of view, listing their considerations in choosing an employer as salary and conditions, lifestyle, operation and training standards offered and status.
Pilots' levels of skill and training, White emphasised, reflect their leverage in the skills trade. Clearly, the best pilots can go for the best jobs. At a time of industry expansion like this, the highly skilled pilot is well placed to choose the airline which offers the best package, with lifestyle seen as increasingly important. "Virtual airlines" impose unwanted stresses upon pilots, White said, because some of the operational and training decisions which a traditional airline would take upon itself are downloaded on to the flightcrew.
From the airline point of view, selection can only be applied if there is a choice of candidates. If an airline does not operate selection procedures, said White, candidates perceive it from the start as having low standards, which sets up a low standards culture from the moment of recruitment.
More attractive conditions clearly win more applicants. According to White, PARC statistics show that recent recruitment indicates that a "modern airline" will get three applicants per vacancy, while the traditional will get 35 for each job on offer. White claimed that there is a direct relationship between the quality of crew hired and the number of applicants available for each job vacancy.
Aptitude tests have shown that a sample of pilots from "modern airline" backgrounds have performed better than the published norm for the general population in numerical and mechanical skills, but less well than the general population on abstract, spatial and critical reasoning. Traditional airline employees, on the other hand, were not only above the general norm, but above the pilot norm.
PARC has predicted that the future will see pilots increasingly trading their skills, with the most able gravitating toward the traditional airlines. Legal considerations, according to the company, "-will facilitate the adoption of best practice, recruitment and selection policies".
The British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) chairman Capt David Marshall also drew a distinction between the structures of what he called the "old style" and "new style" airline management boards. On the old style board, Marshall maintained, there is an operations director, which means that aircrew have a direct line of communication with management. On the "new style" board, he said, operations is not represented because it is no longer a department in its own right, having become a subsidiary of the commercial department, depriving aircrew, or at least their immediate managers, of a direct communications line to the policymakers.
Ab initio training may be outsourced, but ideally it involves close monitoring by the potential employer
THE ISOLATED PILOT
To pilots, said Marshall, feeling in touch is vital, because crews essentially work from home. They do not have an office where they feel physically and mentally in touch with the company they work for. They receive their rosters at home. When they report for work, they climb into an aeroplane and fly away. When they return, they go home. Because of this unusual but traditional system, line pilots can, Marshall said, feel isolated from the company and, as a result of feeling "left out", develop an attitude of suspicion towards their employer, which is clearly not good for the airline.
Marshall advised airlines to employ high quality rostering staff. The Association of European Airlines, he pointed out, estimates that flightcrew represent 8.5% of airline costs, so they are an expensive asset which ought to be managed carefully. Bad rostering is not only inefficient, but it destroys a pilot's quality of life, creates tension, tiredness and eventually fatigue, according to Marshall. Quality of life, he emphasised, echoing PARC's White, is the top issue for the majority of flight crew.
It is generally accepted in the industry that in-house ab initio pilot training is an inefficient use of resources, the evidence being that several airlines in Europe and the USA have stopped doing it. Airlines are, however, increasingly using outsourced ab initio training courses as a part of their selection procedure. The latter tends to follow a pattern which involves assessing candidates either before or in the early part of training, part-sponsoring or securing training loans for those who pass the assessment, then monitoring their progress through training, and bonding them for a repayment period on joining the line.
Whether to carry out type conversion and recurrent crew training in-house or to outsource it is more of a dilemma for airline management. Gerald Volloy of British Aerospace Flight Training Services USA pointed out that outsourcing can cut direct costs, put training in the hands of training specialists and enable an efficient use of resources, but admitted that an airline loses direct control over its crew training standards.
This particularly applies to company standard operating procedures, which can suffer despite the best efforts of a good third party training organisation because its staff have to train to so many different airline requirements.
Volloy predicted that outsourcing training, including recurrent, is likely to become more common "in an environment of diminishing resources". He offered a checklist for those airlines which want to make outsourced training a success: "Contract, communicate, oversee."
The advice to oversee outsourced training echoes the advice of BALPA's Marshall when he warned that pilots can feel remote from their employer. Training is an opportunity for the company to communicate its standards and values to its pilots, and outsourced training without visible company oversight can contribute to that feeling of remoteness.
ICAO's chief of personnel licensing Paul Lamy, speaking at the conference, flagged up a change of emphasis on flightcrew licensing. He called it a change "from licensing standards to training standards", defining a system for measuring pilot performance more effectively. Just in case airlines think that this is not their problem, Lamy pointed out that a review of international training standards is on its way, and ICAO is about to take a firmer in the international Safety Oversight Programme.
Source: Flight International
