Pilot shortage, Fact or Fiction?

In the last few years there has been a lot of media buzz about a “pilot shortage”. This is completely misleading and definitely not exactly true. It may seem like a pilot shortage at first glance but if you dig a little deeper you’ll see that this is simply not the case and fictional.

Yes it’s true that lots or airline pilots are reaching the mandatory retirement age of 65 in the recent years past and upcoming years (McCartney, 2009). However there are plenty of pilots to replace them in our pilot population but due to the recent knee jerk reaction regulations after the 2009 Colgan accident many of these pilots are not qualified to get hired by the airlines yet. Instead of 250 hours new prospective airline pilots need 1500 hours to get hired by the regional airlines (Shlangenstien and Sasso 2016). The only case in which they can get hired with fewer hours is if they are trained in a Part 141 aviation flight training program. These programs are growing in number and becoming more common but are also very expensive and time consuming to complete. The reason for this is because they are almost always associated with a university and a bachelor’s degree as well as your flight training and ratings. This is basically like going to two schools at once which as you can imagine is very demanding and expensive. I personally am currently attending one of these part 141 programs and I absolutely love the opportunity it will give me when I graduate. But when I’m done I’ll have over a hundred thousand dollars and four years of my life invested.

The bottom line is that it’s harder to get the qualifications and training to be hired as an airline pilot then it has ever been in the past. This is for many reasons but the main one is the extended amount of time that it takes to log a thousand to 1500 hours and the increased monetary expense of that averaging anywhere from$70,000 on the low end up to over $100,000 (Croft, 2016). Another factor that adds to the false perception of a pilot shortage is the decreased number of military trained pilots due to the reduction in manned aircraft flying done by our military in the recent years. The American military trains less pilots then it did it did fifty years ago and because of this more and more percentages of the pilot population are coming from civilian flight training and flying.  Civilian flight training is payed for out of pocket by the student instead of by the government which makes it much less obtainable and appetizing to most people. On top of increased flight training costs and tuition fees up until very recent years first year first officers at regional airline could make as low as $20,000 a year. How would you like to spend over 4 years of your life and a hundred thousand dollars to then make twenty thousand a year? Up until recently this was the case and this is the reason regional airlines are finally paying more to their pilots. They need to entice the pilot population that already exists to get the training and qualifications needed be an applicant for the airlines.  Also most major airlines require a bachelor’s degree which just makes the road that much longer and more expensive to becoming a professional pilot at the highest level then it has been in the past.

So what does this all mean? To put it simply it means that we have a shortage of qualified pilots in the pilot pool that the airlines hire from, but definitely not a raw pilot shortage. The main thing that caused this shortage of qualified pilots is the new 1500 hour rule imposed on aspiring ATP certificate holders.  I’m not arguing whether or not this is a good regulation or not that’s an entirely different conversation. I’m just trying to show that we don’t necessarily have a pilot shortage as we always hear about in the news. Instead we have a situation where it is essentially harder to become qualified to be legally eligible to be an airline pilot due to the increased amount of time and money needed to obtain an ATP certificate.

References

John Croft, US Carriers face shrinking pool of pilots, retrieved from http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/us-carriers-face-shrinking-pool-pilots, on 9-30-16

 Mary Shlangenstien and Michael Sasso, Shrinking pool of Future Pilots Keeps Major Airlines on Edge, retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-29/shrinking-pool-of-future-pilots-keeps-major-airlines-on-edge, on 9-30-16

McCartney, S. (2009, June 19). Pilot Pay: Want To Know How Much Your Captain Earns? Retrieved  from http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/16/pilot-pay-want-to-know-how-  your-captain-earns/