Now it appears there might be a pilot shortage post-COVID!
US especially could be hard-hit
www.travelpulse.com
Yep, no surprise, but good news. Behind the scenes there are a lot of forces pulling on the market right now.
All of the airlines, big and small, are maneuvering for market share now. They all think travel will bounce back, just a question of when and not if, and once it does whoever has market share (routes, gates, customers buying their tickets from them instead of brand X) will get to reap the profits. The regionals all want to be the first choice with the mainline partners (it's like a competitive department head mentality, ha ha... ouch) and the main brands want to be the first choice with the traveling public (business travelers, leisure, government, all of the above). "Flexibility" is another buzzword, it means having the pilots and airplanes to add flights to the schedule or to put bigger airplanes on full routes- that's cash in the bank or from a line of credit to pay overtime and that's enough staffing. Don't forget everybody else who keeps the wheels turning, because all kinds of different employee groups have shrunk over the last year too.
A handful of regionals have announced hiring in the last couple weeks and even more are recalling training classes that got put on indefinite hold last spring, or calling people with conditional job offers from a year ago. A few regionals folded during the past year and that's made a lot of people, who are entering the pilot job market, nervous because that sort of flooded the labor pool with qualified, proven pilots that hiring departments supposedly would prefer. The other side of the coin is a lot of pilots soured on the whole thing and have gone on to non-flying careers, maybe for good. If anybody out there has solid data on this then they're not exactly telling everyone. It's anyone's guess how many of those people change their mind a second time and come back to the airlines. A lot of pilots went on mil orders too, how many and for how long is something the personnel departments don't like to share though.
Between about 1-3 years ago the word was that while each of the five or ten major/legacy/cargo airlines had "_ thousand" applications on file while each was hiring in the hundreds. Well, at the same time almost every one of those airlines had the same _ thousand applications on file since a lot of guys apply to many places and go with whoever offers a job first. The same thing happens at regionals and I think their hiring departments are going to rediscover this sometime in the next year or two and suddenly too.
What's true for the regionals is true for Part 135 airplane and helicopter, EMS, corporate, and everywhere else in the market. PERS 43, AFPC, et. al. are going to feel it again too.
Something I would caution about with the "pilot shortage" is that there's been a perpetual pilot shortage for decades. All it really is is the market rate for compensation responding to supply and demand. Employers love to create a lot of buzz about "pilot shortage" because it nudges more people to enter the job market. If you running an airline and your future ops people say you're going to need to hire between 500 and a few thousand pilots in the next three years, you might as well publicly say that you're planning to hire "as many as" that higher figure. That gets more people applying (and it gets the shareholders and investors excited too).
Pilots are a commodity, always remember that. It's like the price of oil, it starts and finishes with money. Denial isn't just a river in Egypt but it goes both ways. We'll be talking about this again sometime in 2030 or so.
