Airlines Face Acute Shortage of Pilots

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203937004578079391643223634.html

by skennedy • 14 years ago

35 51 14 years ago

online.wsj.com

mc32• 14 years ago

I imagine the effect on Junior pilot salary by senior pilots[1] could have some influence on the attractiveness of the profession.

From what I've read, people have mentioned that senior pilots who have great influence on union decisions, take a somewhat expectedly selfish attitude when it comes to negotiating salaries whereby junior pilots are left holding the bag. This gets repeated by junior pilots when they become senior pilots.

[1]http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

jseliger• 14 years ago

I was just going to post something along these lines: from what I've read, the aviation industry's possible "pilot shortage," actually translates to "airlines don't want to pay the market rate, or pay enough to encourage people to become pilots."

Which is usually the case in industries that claim a shortage of workers.

Danieru• 14 years ago

It's not the airline's fault if the pilot's union is optimizing for senior pilots' salarys.

In total Airlines pay pilots plenty, too much even. The issue is that unions have distorted the allocation. A fresh pilot will graduate with considerable debt yet garner a wage far below their economic value. Once they become senior they've "earned" the higher distorted wage. They may even still carry student debt. The situation thus becomes re-enforcing.

danielschonfeld• 14 years ago

As a Captain myself with over 5000 hours, I can say every single word of the linked blog is true and accurate with no exaggeration.

The thing thats astounding in all of this, is how both the FAA and the airlines sat for 5 years since they mandated age 65 and did absolutely nothing. Now, everybody is begging for forgiveness and leeway.

jcoby2• 14 years ago

How do they expect future ATP to get 1500 hours? Cargo and CFI time? Sims? Even circling around in a Cessna 150 at $50/hour that's $75k and it's not even useful time.

toomuchtodo• 14 years ago

Congress upped the minimum flight time requirements, without thinking about the consequences.

rdl• 14 years ago

Seems like a great time to downsize the US Air Force (and other military/government organizations with employ pilots); every (manned, not UAV) pilot and aircraft they cut would also get rid of 50-200 support at various levels.

fkdjs• 14 years ago

Maybe they expect air force vets to fly them?

Datonomics• 14 years ago

Our wise leaders:

"Congress's 2010 vote to require 1,500 hours of experience in August 2013 came in the wake of several regional-airline accidents, although none had been due to pilots having fewer than 1,500 hours."

marshallp3• 14 years ago

Airplanes should be fully automated, they probably already have the technology to do this. They could start with cargo planes and then move to passenger once the public fears are quelled.

hatcravat• 14 years ago

No, they really shouldn't. Autopilots are very good at handling routine, monotonous tasks and very bad at handling unusual or unexpected tasks. See, for example, Air Canada 143, British Airways 38, Air France 447 (admittedly, the crew human crew didn't handle that one so well, but only after the automated system completely gave up), US Air 1549. The BA 38 flight in particular highlights why you really, really want a human crew on board. The pilots of that flight had to over-ride the autopilot, and turned what would have been a complete disaster with everyone killed into a mere total write-off with less than 50 injuries and no fatalities.

marshallp3• 14 years ago

What were the things an autopilot couldn't handle. If more engineering effort were spent, couldn't those also be automatically handled. Plus, couldn't airplanes be remote controlled.

aaronbrethorst• 14 years ago

Wow, I hadn't heard about this before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_38

greenyoda• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure that it will be a long time before we have technology that can land a plane safely in the Hudson River after it loses all power due to multiple bird collisions.

And we'd need to be able to do this even for a cargo plane with no passengers on board, since a disabled plane crashing into a populated area would cause a lot of deaths.

marshallp3• 14 years ago

That's what people said about driving cars as well. until a serious effort showed it was possible.

saosebastiao• 14 years ago

Shortages and surpluses only exist when prices are mismatched. Pay up.

ekianjo2• 14 years ago

No, such things also exist when regulations restrict the market flow. Or when trade unions protect their privileges in an excessive manner, preferring the lead the company to bankruptcy than to accept any compromise. And you know what, you have both phenomena in the aviation business. Hardly a coincidence they face such difficulties.

malandrew2• 14 years ago

Is there any chance that this shortage will prompt a more serious consideration of having planes take off and land totally via AI?

jacquesm3• 14 years ago

You don't need AI for that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland

You'd need it very much if you wanted to deal with unforeseen situations. In those cases pilots come in real handy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549

michael_miller• 14 years ago

I'm a student pilot, and based on conversations I've had with my CFI (certified flight instructor), this article seems accurate.

Basically, it's really expensive to learn to fly. Think $112/hr for an extremely basic 2 seat plane, and around $65/hr for the instructor, at least in the NY area. Even assuming you do all the bookwork on your own without an instructor, that's around $7-8k for a private license(40-50h). After that, you need to get an instrument rating(40h), for around the same price.

Then, at 250 hours, you can get a commercial rating which lets you fly people around for money (you can't solicit passengers though). At this point, pilots usually go for a CFI rating, which lets them teach students. Most flight schools are happy to have the cheap labor, and the pilots want to get more hours so they can apply to regional airlines. The pay is pretty horrible (maybe $20-$30/h when you start), but it's the only way to build hours for most pilots. After doing this for a while (could be up to 600-700h), pilots either manage to find a gig flying businesspeople around on a corporate jet, an odd job like ferrying cargo around on a small plane, or go to a regional carrier. Regional carriers pay even worse than being a CFI, around $20k-$30k starting, but the tradeoff is that you're building time in a "serious" turboprop/jet plane, which the big airlines require before even hiring you as a first officer.

You have to take on a massive amount of debt to become a pilot, then get paid terrible wages once you start. Even when you hit the top and become a captain at a major airline you're still only making around $100-$110k, and very few pilots achieve this.

Raising the number of hours required to be hired as a pilot will cause less people to become pilots. It means CFIs will be instructors for much longer, making it harder for newly minted CFIs to find a job to pay off their debt.

The fundamental problem is that avgas costs a ton (up to $6-$7 in NY). If it was free, or at least much cheaper, to fly a plane, the hour requirements would not be a problem - pilots could just train for longer. I think the solution is going to be electric trainer planes. I see the most promising company in this area as beyond aviation (http://www.beyond-aviation.com/). They're developing an electric version of the Cessna 172, the most popular plane produced to date(43k+). Their president was the COO at Cessna for 6 years, so I'm really hopeful they can achieve their goal.

An electric plane has three major benefits: no avgas needed, air inlets can be reduced significantly (no oxygen-hogging combustion reactions) for reduced drag, and significantly reduced TBO. Background: on piston engine planes, a mechanic needs to disassemble the engine every ~2k hours of flying, replace bad parts, and reassemble it. This costs around $15k, contributing a nontrivial amount of money to cost of flying. On an electric planes, the engines last much longer (think 20k-30k hours), so this cost all but vanishes.

mahyarm• 14 years ago

I can't wait for practical & automated electrical airplanes to start becoming a market reality. So many short hops will become affordable that could really use it. The Victoria,BC, Seattle & Vancouver triangle is one good example. Victoria is on an island, and requires a 3hr ferry boat ride on a schedule to get off the island.

raverbashing• 14 years ago

Not to mention in the US there are a lot of pilots that came from a "free flying school" called USAF

That's probably one of the causes of distortion. They skip some steps (compared to an all-civilian air course) and have several flight hours

Spooky232• 14 years ago

Well, I suppose that after a decade or more of turning civil aviation into a awful career this was bound to happen. Airlines have successfully stripped pensions and frozen pilot wages for years.

At this point, a regional jet pilot is making less than a Starbucks barista or Apple Store salesman. ( http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/16/pilot-pay-want-to... )

ekianjo2• 14 years ago

In case you did not read the article in depth, most of what is happening to cause this shortage is due to more and more regulations. There will still be people who want to fly even if their salary is cheap, because that is their passion, just like there were writers and authors since the damn of civilization even when they could not make a living out of it. Salaries are not everything.

Spooky232• 14 years ago

It's the Wall Street Journal, so of course they would say that regulations are the root cause.

To put it in WSJ-speak: The present situation is evidence that we have exhausted the marketplace of people willing to fly airplanes for poor pay, eroding benefits and lousy job security.

brownbat• 14 years ago

Here's to WSJ featuring labor shortage stories.

pinaceae4• 14 years ago

the era of pilots seated in the plane is coming to an end, as so often, the military (air force) leads the way. the f22/35 will be the last platform to deploy with cockpits.

air space all around the world is becoming open for drones. cargo planes will be the first to switch to drone operation. for the people pointing out that AI is not there yet - drones are piloted by humans on the ground. BUT: you can have multiple drones monitored by one person. only sticky situations need human attention. the flight time over the atlantic at 35000ft does not need humans on board, cause guess what, it is already being flown on auto.

think of the savings for DHL, UPS, FEDEX. no more pilots in the craft means more room (no cockpit, no life support, etc). pilots on the ground can follow different safety regulation for sleep periods. you can switch to any pilot during flight, not just the one in the plane. and liability is way cheaper, you can actually decide to crash the plane into the sea in case of a failure.

i would not invest in being a driver of any kind as a long term thing. trains, planes, automobiles - the writing is on the wall. subways already become automated, trains are next.

jilebedev• 14 years ago

Piloting machines (cars, busses, trains, jets) is a task that is fundamentally fit better for a machine than a human.

webreac2• 14 years ago

takeoff, landing and cruise are nicely handled by autopilot. But I do not want to be on a plane with remote pilot. If the plane has a technical problem (which occurs very often, even if passengers are not aware of most of them), I want the pilot to do his best to save his life.

albumedia• 14 years ago

Yea right. They've been saying this for years.

How is this possible when there are so many qualified pilots looking for a job?

ern• 14 years ago

Flying around in empty airspace or towing banners doesn't give you the training you need to fly a complex airplane.

I am no pilot, but two recent high profile crashes, the Colgan Air crash at Buffalo and Air France 447 were caused by pilots not handling stalls correctly.

Perhaps, there really is a need for more basic flying experience?

UnoriginalGuy• 14 years ago

I'll grant that Colgan Air raises serious questions about the pilots abilities.

Air France 447 was more complex than you make it sound. The pilots lost their spacial awareness due to weather and then made a number of mistakes which caused their instruments to "malfunction" (the stall warning stopped even though they were still technically stalling, and then came back on when they tried to correct the stall).

Essentially Air France 447 is what happens when a pilot decides some of their instruments aren't working correctly and aren't sure which (air speed was in fact malfunctioning but everything else was fine). This wasn't helped by things like Alternative Law turning on and disabling AoA protection (which the pilots wouldn't know they were violating without a visible horizon line or one that they trusted).

Now, yes, Air France 447 was caused by human error. But it wasn't simply "not handling stalls correctly." They literally didn't know which was was up or down, and the stall warning was starting and stopping at seemingly random times.

salem• 14 years ago

This sounds like a problem of the airlines own making, underpaying junior pilots for years.

juanjobego• 14 years ago

Why are they so surprised? They've been kicking the pilot´s butts for years... "they are just drivers... my son plays better his gameboy... they don't deserve their salary..." But then, what about having to pay more than $100.000 for a title that only grants you a $1000 pay job? What about not having a single leave day when your family does? What about being so stressed that you can barely sleep? and if you are not stressed, what about long haul flights, where your sleep turns are so disturbed that you can't sleep back the way you should? Or having to be always fit to pass the medical? Or being observed and recorded on your activity to make you liable when you don't act as a robot? Would any surgeon accept it? And many other things. It is worth it for a while, but not forever. Do they thing pilost love to go the other side of the world to work for a Gulf Airline? Or a chinese? Nope. But then the salaries make it worth. When people loose their city connections, or when "inexplicable" accidents occur, then they will pay more for their tickets, and the balance will be back. Meanwhile, we still think that it makes sense "to pay more for the taxi to the airport than for an airline ticket to a town two hours away..." We got what we deserve.

Airlines Face Acute Shortage of Pilots

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