REPERCUSSIONS OF DEMAND
Airline hiring boom reverberates throughout the pilot community
By John Boyce, Contributing Editor
March 2001
An unusual but not unprecedented jump in airline pilot hirings over the past few years has led to a situation which has many flight schools scrambling for flight instructors. At the same time, it may be having an effect on the quality of training received at the entry level.
Major
airlines, enjoying a boom over the past three to five years, are hiring
some 5,000 pilots per year and don’t have a shortage. However, they
are getting many of those pilots from national and regional carriers,
who, in turn, get the bulk of their pilots from the ranks of Certified
Flight Instructors (CFI). To fill their pilot seats, the regional and
commuter carriers have been reducing their minimum flight hours, which
means the CFIs aren’t staying with flight schools as long as they
had to in the past to build up hours. Thus, a flight instructor shortage.
"I don’t think there’s any
question," says David Kennedy at the National Air Transportation
Association, "that the airlines are hiring a bunch of people and
that is creating a downstream problem for flight schools."
Kit Darby, president and founder of AIR
Inc. of Atlanta, which tracks aviation hiring trends, says, "All
the regionals are having severe turnover problems. They averaged between
50 and 70 percent of their pilots hired last year and they’re extremely
busy hiring and training new pilots. And they’re losing them to the
major airlines almost as fast as they do that. That (regional airlines)
is where the flight instructors find their first jobs. It’s sort
of a top down problem, where we’re hiring a lot at the top and it
pulls pilots through the whole system....
"There are (flight) schools out there
that are unable to do business. They’re unable to expand or even
maintain their current business due to the lack of flight instructors."
"Absolutely," says Sean Elliott,
executive director of the National Associa-tion of Flight Instructors,
when asked if airline hiring has created a vacuum at the bottom end of
the pilot pipeline. "You look at the hiring minimums of the airlines
and they have gone down and down consistently over the last three years.
They have reduced the number of hours required, the type of equipment
flown. What used to be a three-year process to get to the regional job
is now a 12-month process....
"We’ve seen a lot of the instructor
ranks move on to the higher paying jobs, which has done two things: It’s
created a shortage; and, it has started an increase in the CFI pay scale,
which is a really good thing."
Leslie Erb, who runs a flight school at
his FBO in Centralia, IL, Airgo, Inc., says of the situation, "Normally,
a beginning pilot comes to us with zero time and we instruct him up to
flight instructor, which is about 250 hours. He would usually stay with
us until about 1,500 hours, which is two years. Now, they (regionals)
pick him up with 500 hours. It’s difficult for us to keep people
here but it’s also difficult for charter operators, freight operators,
and the airlines. Everybody is having the same problem."
SAFETY A CONCERN
With pilots, particularly CFIs, on a fast
track to the airlines, a question has arisen about the safety of less
experienced flight instructors teaching new students, or as one observer
put it, "babies teaching babies."
According to Mike Henry, manager of the
general aviation and commercial division of the FAA’s flight standards
service, "training accidents, overall, were down last year but the
number of fatal training accidents and the number of training fatalities
right now appear to be up." A full analysis of the raw data is underway.
"Right now," says Henry, "it
looks like this past training year we had a higher number of midair collisions
that were attributed to training. It also seems there were more people
in the airplanes than we have historically seen. For example, the accident
close to Philadelphia, I believe with a Navajo that had nine people in
it, had a midair with a multi-engine trainer that had two people in it.
So, eleven fatalities — that’s very unusual."
The Air Safety Foundation, an affiliate
of the Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association, is also analyzing the data.
Preliminary findings suggest that while the number of fatal accidents
is indeed up, there doesn’t appear to be any trend or common thread.
"At this point," says Warren Morningstar,
vice president of communications for AOPA in Frederick, MD, "there
is no pattern. There is nothing to support the premise that it’s
inexperienced flight instructors (who are responsible for the accidents).
It’s just all over the place. Many of the accidents involved already
certificated pilots, so clearly these are prime students. Some of them
were solo accidents but they were called training accidents because the
pilot was working on an additional rating."
Hal Shevers, founder and chairman of Sporty’s
in Batavia, OH, says almost coyly, "Just a clue: It looks like the
studies will show that the brand-new, green, inexperienced instructors
aren’t killing people. I’m just giving you a clue as to what
I’ve heard. And I definitely did not say it was the more experienced
ones. The new ones are no worse than the old ones, apparently. Maybe the
new instructors are a little more cautious."
CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM
Shevers says that more people are learning
to fly, which will lead to the pipeline filling at the bottom end. Shevers’
optimism is cautiously shared by Drew Steketee, the new president and
CEO of GA Team 2000 and the BE A PILOT program, headquartered in Washington,
D.C. He reports that the program will soon announce an aggressive new
plan to increase the number of student starts.
Says Steketee, "If you’re going
to be optimistic about this, even though the economy is going to decelerate,
it’s going to be a manageable proposition.
"I’m not sure about the airline
hiring boom continuing, except that the airline forecasts show tremendous
growth. If that relates to the number of units in service and the number
of pilots required, that may be the answer. We’ve moved up to over
600 million airline passengers a year and it’s forecast to go over
1 billion in the future.
"The other thing is that some of these
regional airline careers are more attractive than they used to be as the
regionals very quickly convert to all jet fleets."
Steketee thinks part of the solution will
be increasing student starts, assuming, of course, that instructors are
available. He says that he can’t be sure of the number of student
starts because "the FAA has some problems with student start statistics.
(But) from data before now, we know that we’re climbing up from the
60,000 level (of the early 1980s) but we’re not back to the historic
90,000 to 100,000 student starts figure that is the long-running average
in this business."
James Lampman, director of operations and
senior vice president of Virginia Aviation in Lynchburg, VA, says, "I’m
on the board of Ohio Unive-rsity, and they’re simply tooling up to
produce more pilots. The institutions around the country that have the
capacity to produce more pilots are simply doing that. The major players
are buying more airplanes, hiring more instructors, and hiring more general
staff to produce more pilots."
