When You can't Find a Pilot when You Want One

    After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the airline and economy downturn, around 10,000 pilots lost their jobs - or in airline parlance, were furloughed. Now that there's been an industry upturn, the airlines are finding that many of those pilots don't want their old jobs back.... or simply have other ones. In many cases the downturn forced younger and middle-ranking pilots to broaden their horizons and look for greater job security. The talent drought is just starting to impact upon the planning of some major stateside airlines. Their fleet expansion and route planning is now having to factor in the availability of experienced airframe drivers. Less than half of pilots offered back their old jobs are rejoining the fold. Pilot workloads are now higher, pay is much lower, "away from home" time has increased and there are a myriad alternatives outside the USA - ones that come with a lifestyle attached.
    Boeing estimates that over the next 18 years the World's airliner fleet will double and generate a need for around 210,000 pilots. That's why its training arm Alteon is building facilities for pilot-training all over the world. Training organizations have been empowered by ICAO's Multi Crew Pilot License Scheme. That pilot plot promises to spit out a right-hand seater with 240 hours of training (but that's not actual stick-time, nor will the graduate cadet have ever solo'd). Much of the MPL training will occur with computer-based training and with varying degrees of simulator sophistication. And of course then there's the need for pilots that will be generated by the new Very Light Jets (VLJ's). About a 1000 of them will be floating around by 2010, each requiring 5 pilots for maximum utilization.
    To stopgap the time period until the MPL graduates start entering the profession, Congress and the FAA have decided that the once verboten proposition of pilots flying to age 65 is now OK. That measure will soften the impact of training costs and lessen the number of new hires by around 5%. Of course not all pilots will want to aviate until age 65. Getting all these sums right and along a time-line, so that expensive airframes won't be parked for a lack of crews, will soon be occupying the minds of airline boards everywhere. As a few Indian and Chinese airlines have recently found, get those sums wrong and revenue suffers.