Why The U.S. Has A Severe Pilot Shortage

Now air speed is alive. And we rotate at 55, 55 rotate, pull up. Yes, look how beautiful thisbird flies and we'll climb with 80 knots. This 23-year-old is part ofAlaska Airlines effort to fix the pilot shortagecrisis. North American airlineshave a deficit of 8,000 pilots or about 11% of thetotal workforce. Do you see the right one?Yes. 324.

All right. Here we go. It's a great feeling toknow that I could take control of an airplane,tiny as me, 5'3″ short little girl, having alittle booster seat. Alaska's Ascend PilotAcademy, launched in 2022, offers would be aviators,financial incentives and employment opportunities atAlaska Airlines and regional partner Horizon Air. Programs like this areperhaps the most significant.

Step carriers are taking toaddress the exodus of pilots. The shortfall couldreach up to 30,000 in North America by 2025. There's just not enoughpilots, and it's not a quick fix on pilots. And the industry at thestart of the year was going to try to hire 13,000pilots. The last decade there'sbeen a new supply of 5 to 7,000 pilots. The math justdoesn't work.

It's great to see thatthere's such a need for pilots, but there's a levelof how did this happen that you're almost standing on astreet corner, step right up, come be a pilot. I mean it. Here's somemoney. That's a sign that we havefailed as an institution. And it's not just the lackof pilots that is impacting aviation, mechanics,baggage handlers and air traffic controllers arealso in short supply.

So what led to the shortageof pilots in the US and what are carriers like United,Delta and Alaska doing to fix the problem? Caitlyn Jimenez graduatedfrom Cal State, L.A., with a degree in childdevelopment. That's when I was, like,putting my foot down after graduation I was like, Ican't go into teaching. I want to do somethingdifferent, which is fly. I want to fly.

I want to fly. I'm eager tofly. Beyond telling her parents,her second biggest obstacle was figuring out how to payfor flight school. To become an airline pilot costs range from $80,000 to over $100,000, made moredifficult by years of training. Where am I going to live? How am I going to affordit? How am I going to pay offthe loans?.

The costs are definitely abarrier to becoming a pilot. Jimenez enrolled in Alaska'sAscend Pilot Academy in Hillsboro, Oregon. The program offers eligiblestudents a stipend of up to $25,000, as well as lowinterest loans. Jimenez, along with most ofher class, had no prior piloting experience. And full power right rudder. Beautiful. Cadets starttheir day in ground school,.

Followed by training on aflight simulator. 31. One of the things thatwe do with flight training is we progressivelyintroduce more and more complex maneuvers. So whatwe're going to practice is an engine failure. What you're going to do isbring the throttle back to idle after you rotate andthen try to land the aircraft safely. Pitch. Pitch, pitch. Lower thenose. Lower the nose.

I get your flaps, doinggreat. So right now it looks prettygood. We have some thunderstorm segments atthe coast and we have some in Seattle. Preflight planning isfollowed by an inspection of the aircraft. Exactly. And on board training withan instructor. Alaska says it can take ayear to 18 months to train a cadet to become acommercial pilot.

Then also the same. We justcheck if the person before us did not have a tailstrike. Plus 1,500 hours or roughlytwo years to get a FAA pilot license. Oregon'schallenging weather conditions are anotherobstacle. So it's very quick. You're going to learnsomething today and then you're going to do it thenext day. The Academy also hopes todiversify who sits in the.

Pilot's seat? Only about 6%of us airline pilots are people of color, and lessthan 6% are women. I do want to represent mebeing a Mexican and me being a female and me being smalland tiny that, you know, if I could do it, people coulddo it. Now, at 900, we can turnone Westbound. (Radio Traffic) And you can just continueclimbing. U.S. carriers are scramblingfor solutions to add and.

Retain crew members. American Airlines ownedregional carriers Piedmont and Envoy hiked pilot payby 50% through the end of August 2024. Delta, along with severalcarriers, have dropped the four year degree from pilothiring requirements. And SkyWest and FrontierAirlines have recruited pilots from as far away asAustralia. But what led to theshortage of pilots in the.

First place? In a bid toslash costs during the COVID pandemic, airlines groundedplanes and offered early retirement packages tothousands of senior pilots. Pilots took the earlyretirement for a variety of reasons. There's 1,000pilots and may be near 1,000 reasons why. But ingeneral, a pilot may have reached a point in theircareer where they said, you know what, I'm 62 and I'mfeeling it. A halt to training duringthe pandemic also impacted.

The pipeline. Training never stops in theairline business. The number one logjam rightnow at American Airlines is the training pipeline. It has collapsed. A massive amount oftraining that they didn't do during the pandemic isstill an overhang on that system. Carriers have also seenfewer pilots coming from the.

Military, which has facedrecruitment issues of its own. The Department ofDefense had a shortfall of 3,000 pilots, according toa 2019 report to Congress. The Air Force and itsReserves finished fiscal year 2018, down 2,000pilots, or roughly 10% of its staffing. Thetransition to drone pilots is also impactingcommercial carriers. The military of today is notjust about traditional airplanes and helicopters.

They're flying drones andthey've got all sorts of other new types ofaircraft. Frankly, a lot of the folksfrom the Air Force Academy now you see more dronepilots than you do commercial pilots. Thatpipeline has dried up over 40%. So we've got to makeup for that from somewhere else. And perhaps the hardest hitsegment of the industry is regional carriers like MesaAirlines, who have seen.

Their ranks poached byhigher paying national rivals. As a result of thepilot shortage we have lost scheduled airline serviceto more than 50 smaller US cities. So a few airlines havealready started to cancel flights because they saythat they do have a lack of pilots. That's a really bigdeal, especially in small cities, because those areserved by regional airlines and that's where the pilotshortage is the most acute.

There are about 164,000pilots in the U.S. with an airline transportcertificate. A senior captain at thehelm of a wide body plane flying for a nationalcarrier can make around $400,000 a year. But before reaching thatmilestone, pilots often spend years flying forregional carriers. A captain at a regionalairline starts off making about $100,000 a year.

You may be operatinganywhere from 4 to 6 flight segments a day, dependingon how long they are. You may get as little as 10hours or so of rest a night, and you may be away fromhome for 3 to 5 days at a time. It can be veryphysically grueling. It can be emotionallytaxing. A drop in new pilotsentering the field means almost half of pilots areapproaching the mandatory retirement age of 65.

One third of pilots in theU.S. Are in their fifties.Another 13% are between 60 and 64. Some are callingfor legislation to increase the retirement age to 67,but not everyone agrees. I don't think the retirementage will get lifted. I also don't think it's thesolution at United our age, 64 pilots, 36% of them areunavailable to fly on a given day for sick, longterm or short term medical. The medical requirementsare really, really stringent.

For being a pilot. Another possible changewould be to reduce the flight time required for apilot to be certified. Following the crash ofColgan Air Flight 3407 in Buffalo, New York, in 2009 the FAA set new rules for pilots. U.S. regulations require pilotsto have 1,500 hours of flight time before beingallowed to work at a commercial airline.

Those hours can be achieveddoing anything from flight instruction to bannertowing operations. There are exceptions forsome students and military. But critics argue the 1,500hour rule is costly and puts too high a burden on newpilots. The accessibility to flightexperience, the hours and the actual experience isdevastating these young aviators. The debate willbe whose neck is on the line should an accident occur inthe future, where a pilot.

With less than 1,500 hoursof experience is at the controls of an airliner,that crashes. In the meantime, carriersare taking matters into their own hands and movingmore of their pilot trading duties in-house. Like Alaska, United openedits Aviate Academy in 2022, offering incoming studentsfinancial incentives along with low interest loans. The carrier said it plansto train 5,000 new pilots at.

Its facility by 2030 andhire 10,000 pilots that same year. It's not just United, it'sJetBlue, Delta, American, Southwest. They're alllooking to now bring some of these things in-house,whereas before they were more used to looking tooutside or come when you have experience. Well,right now they need it now. And those programs arewelcome news for travelers facing long lines at theairport and flight delays.

Brought about by the acutepilot shortage, which is likely to get worse. North America will needmore than 128,000 new pilots over the next two decades. And what the airlines andregional airlines, major airlines are all trying todo, same thing goes for the cargo carriers because theyneed new pilots as well, is trying to recruit as asyoung as possible or as early in the careers of apilot as possible.

It's unbelievable that wewere able to go up in the sky and do things not a lotof people can do. It's a beautiful feeling.

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